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OF PRI 
OCT 4 1924 






Section. 





Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/legendsofisraeleOOjohn 


THE LEGENDS 
OElie e RATE 1 





THE LEGEN ee oO DF fou 
ISRAEL ° y 


ESSAYS IN INTERPRETATION OF SOME 
FAMOUS STORIES FROM THE 
OLD TESTAMENT 


BY 


LEWIS ‘JOHNSON 





GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
1924 


(All rights reserved) 


Printed in Great Britain by 
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, LONDON AND WOKING 


PREFATORY NOTE 


HE word “legend” in this book is used loosely to 

cover various kinds of narrative. Some of the 
stories under consideration here are primitive myths ; 
others are folk-tales of early heroes; others are fragments 
of history more or less richly embroidered with fancy 5 
others, again, are deliberate works of artistic fiction. But 
all have the common character of popular tales told down 
the ages, and always to be told, because of certain funda- 
mental truths embedded in them. Attempt has been 
made here to emphasize and illustrate these underlying 
truths, and so a certain homiletic quality is given to the 
following chapters. 

These are not, however, simply printed sermons, though 
the bulk of the material in them has been preached from 
the pulpit. They aim at emphasizing literary interests 
as much as moral interests. Indeed, the book is written 
in the conviction that all moral use of the Old Testament 
is vitiated without the aid of literary and imaginative in- 
sight, and that literary criticism is inseparable from a true 
didacticism. ‘There is little or nothing new in the inter- 
pretations given; they are along the lines of criticism 
accepted by all modern scholarship. But such interpreta- 
tions have not, I think, previously been gathered together 
in a single volume of popular essays. ‘They are thus gathered 
here in the hope that they may contribute to a more realistic 
grasp of a very. noble literature, grown unreal to many 
because the living work of human imagination in it has 


become petrified into an idol of supernatural prodigy. And 
| 5 


6 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


they are selected and presented so as to illustrate, as far 
as their material allows, many of the cardinal truths of 
our faith. 

Readers who desire to explore further for themselves 
the grounds on which various critical treatments of these 
stories are based may consult with advantage the small 
popular volumes of the Century Bible commentary, especi- 
ally Dr. Bennett’s volumes on Genesis and Exodus, and 
Dr. Charles’s on Daniel. Articlesin Hastings’ Dictionary of 
the Bible and in the Encyclopedia Brblica will also frequently 
be found useful. For the geographical background so 
‘indispensable for the comprehension of many details in 
these stories, Sir G. A. Smith’s Historical Geography of the 
Holy Land is of supreme value ; and Dean Stanley’s Simaz 
and Palestine 1s also abundantly helpful. For a popular 
outline of the histories of the old empires the reader should 
consult the volumes on Chaldea, Assyria and Egypt in 
the Story of the Nations series. An admirable survey of 
the reaction of these empires upon Israel may be found, 
too, in Mr. Basil Matthews’ little book The Riddle of 
Nearer Asia, Parallels from classical history and myth 
have been drawn from Grote’s History of Greece. Several 
other authorities, such as Robertson Smith’s Religion of 
the Semites, Frazer’s Folk-lore in the Old Testament, Doughty’s 
Arabia Deserta, etc., will be found referred to in the text, 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
PREFATORY NOTE r ; : é ; , : 5 
CHAPTER 
I. THE LOST EDEN . ‘ : ; : : ; ely 
Il. THE MESSAGE OF THE RAINBOW ; ; . eee 47 
III. BABEL AND PENTECOST : ; ; : . Re ae 8 
Iv. AN INTERCESSION FOR SODOM . . . : 55 
V. THE SACRIFICE OF THE BELOVED SON : ; ree OO 
VI. THE DREAM OF THE HEAVENLY LADDER . . ae =e 
VII. WRESTLING WITH GOD , ; : ; : Tens 
VIII. THE BABE AFLOAT. : : : : : Mts Kegs 
IX. THE BURNING BUSH . ; : i ; : Pe ih Gk 
X. A HIGHWAY THROUGH THE SEA . : : ; DES ee 
XI. THE PILLAR OF CLOUD AND FIRE ; : : sy bd 
XII. THE CORN OF HEAVEN : : ‘ : ‘ ee bok 
XIII. THE WALLS OF JERICHO . : ‘ : ; ape de: 
XIV. GIDEON AND THE FLEECE . : : ‘ : pking oy 4 
XV. A CHILD AS PROPHET : ; ‘ é A aero) 
XVI. THE TRAGEDY OF SAUL. : : i : A han ds 
XVII. THE DOWNFALL OF THE GIANT-KILLER . : tae aad) 


XVIII. THE RIVAL ALTARS ° ° ° ° ° ° © 243 


8 


CHAPTER 
A STILL SMALL VOICE . . . 


XIX. 


XX. 


XXI. 


XXII. 


XXIII. 


XXIV. 


XXY. 


THE 


THE 


THE 


THE 


THE 


THE 


THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


CHARIOT OF ASCENSION ° . . 
INVISIBLE ALLIES e 

DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB . . 
FOURTH MAN IN THE FURNACE . ° 
HAND WRITING ON THE WALL 


SIGN OF THE PROPHET JONAH 


PAGE 
255 
269 


a | 
295 
3°7 
321 


335 





And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, 
to know good and evil . . . so he drove out the man; and he placed 
at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword 
which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. 

GENESIS lil. 22~24, 


I 
THE LOST EDEN 


‘Tis delightful now and-then to get back into the child- 
like atmosphere of these old stories about the genesis — 
of mankind. ‘They are bathed in the freshness of the 
early world; and the morning dew has never been blown 
away from them. ‘They are grave as with the wonder of 
childhood, and content, as childhood is content, with very 
broad and simple moral conclusions. But it is with the 
big primary questions that they are concerned ; and their 
straight and simple thrusts toward elementary explanations 
remain provocative to us still—as a child’s ingenuous 
surmise may sometimes flash light on a vexed question 
where the adult mind, with its confused half-knowledge, 
gropes hesitatingly for an answer. 

How did the world begin to be? Why is man subject 
to toil and sorrow? Why does he die? Why are there 
so many different kinds of men with different languages ? 
What keeps the sea in its place: why does it not spread 
all over the earth? Such are the problems. ‘They have 
engaged men’s curiosity from the beginning. And the 
answers that the early world gave to them are full of interest. 

Israel borrowed its answers to these questions from 
the literature of its older and more civilized neighbour, 
Babylon. Chaldean poetry had its myths which attempted, 
in lieu of science, to offer imaginative explanations of these 
problems. Nothing better was forthcoming; and so 
Israel accepted these poetic myths, worked them over in 
the light of her higher religious conceptions, and embodied 

I 


™ 


12 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


them in her scriptures, where they still stand for our amuse- 
ment and instruction. 

In regard to the poem of Creation, the story of the Flood, 
and others, the parallel Babylonian accounts have been 
discovered, and we can make our detailed comparisons 
between them and the Bible versions. In regard to the 
story of the Garden of Eden this is notso. Yet the original 
of this story is almost certainly Babylonian. ‘There is a 
famous cylinder of ancient Chaldean workmanship, now in 
the British Museum, which portrays a man and a woman 
sitting on either side of a tree, towards which they stretch 
out their hands for the fruit, while a serpent stands erect 
on its tail behind the woman, as if whispering into her 
ear. ‘This is generally supposed to illustrate some such 
story as that of the Temptation. But more than this: it 
has been pointed out that the most ancient name for the 
coastward plain of Babylonia was Edin, with a chief city 
and port called Eridu, the site of which is now many leagues 
inland, owing to the sea being silted up by the great rivers ; 
and in Chaldean mythology there existed in the neighbour- 
hood of Eridu a holy garden where grew the sacred palm- 
tree—the tree of life—with roots of precious stones reach- 
ing down into the abyss, while its trunk marked the very 
centre of the earth. ‘he quaint geographical note inserted 
in the Genesis story at chapter ii. 10-14, probably by 
some later commentator, has even been ingeniously explained 
as adding evidence to the case for identifying this locality 
with Eden. For it is said that two other rivers, as well 
as Tigris and Euphrates, flowed separately into the Persian 
Gulf in those far-away times, and the Gulf, then reaching 
much farther northward than now, was itself thought of, 
and spoken of, as a river. Now, since its tides carried the 
sea-water far up-stream twice a day, the four inflowing 
rivers might have been ignorantly spoken of as outflowing 
from the Gulf: hence the one river which “‘ was parted 
and became into four heads.” Whether such surmise 


THE LOST EDEN 13 


be justifiable or not, there can be little doubt that our Eden 
story takes its ultimate origin from the sacred garden of 
Eridu in Edin, and that in its main features it follows an 
earlier Babylonian tale. 

It is in any case obvious that our Bible narrative is a 
derivative one. ‘There are features in it, lingering from 
some earlier source, which are not made an integral part 
of the story as related here. ‘There is, in particular, the 
puzzle of the two trees—the tree of life in the midst of the 
garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 
The tree of life was not forbidden to Adam and Eve, and 
plays no part in the story of temptation; yet at the close 
God is represented as turning the culprits out of Eden, lest, 
having eaten of the forbidden tree of knowledge, they should 
go on to eat of the tree of life, which the story up till then 
had expressly allowed them to do. And it is to guard this 
tree of life that the flaming sword is set upon Eden’s gate. 
Evidently the Hebrew author is either trying to combine 
two distinct narratives, or else he is trying, somewhat 
clumsily, to re-shape the original narrative and give a fresh 
turn to it; and in so doing has left certain features of it 
indicated which have no real place in the story as he meant 
to tell it. “They are not properly worked into his allegory, 
but stick out in it like eruptive boulders of ancient rock 
protruding into more recent strata. Sir James Frazer has 
argued, in his Fo/k-lore in the Old Testament, from parallels 
in other myths in various parts of the world, that the original 
story probably spoke of a tree of life and a tree of death, 
the former of which man was urged by God to eat, and the 
latter of which he was forbidden to eat ; but the serpent— 
as elsewhere, in kindred myths, various other creatures— 
by its cunning induced man to disobey ; man ate the deadly 
fruit and left the fruit of immortality to the snake, which, 
by casting and renewing its skin every year, was thought 
to survive indefinitely. 

If this be so, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil 


14 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


belongs to a later variant of the story, which in the Hebrew 
version has ousted its predecessor—the story about the 
trees of life and death—yet not without leaving clear traces 
of the latter’s influence. The original story would have 
set out to explain why man was not immortal. But we 
must trace another motive in the later version favoured by 
Genesis: the motive here is to account for the fact of 
human sorrow; though the problem of death is still in 
the background of the writer's mind, and the suggestion 
that death is the penalty for man’s misbehaviour is tacked 
on to the story. 

The story of Eden in Genesis faces up to the problem : 
what is the curse that infects our world? Why is man 
born to sorrow? Why do labour and pain and death dog 
his footsteps? Man is created with great potentiality 
for delight: yet his delight is so thwarted as rather to 
mock him than to satisfy him ; with great potentiality for 
beautiful achievement: yet his vision always outreaches 
his grasp, and he has the pain of an endless search without 
the glory of arrival. What means all this unsatisfied hunger, 
this weary battle? “As the fishes that are taken in an 
evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare, so 
are the sons of men snared in an evil time.” 

All the ages have beaten their wings against this cage— 
this mystery of unescapable toil and grief into which we are 
all born. Each new generation may imagine, in its hot eager 
youth, that it will smash through the bars and win to 
liberty and paradise ; but after a while it, too, settles down 
under the iron discipline of earth. Eden is a lost treasure. 
We feel it as a /ost treasure because of the ineradicable 
instinct in us that we ultimately belong to, and have rights 
in, a sphere of life different from, and better than, that 
which we now know. A Golden Age is our inheritance ; 
why, then, do we live through interminable Iron Ages? 
Well ! the full answer to that query may be very long and 
complex—embracing, indeed, all philosophy. But this old 


THE LOST EDEN 15 


myth of Eden puts a finger on a salient point in it, and 
is content to say: “We toil and sweat in the wilderness 
because there is moral defect in us. We were intended for 
Eden, but we are unworthy of it.” As it is disobedience 
that brings trouble to childhood, so the word “ disobedience ”’ 
is uttered by this old childlike literature as the indispensable 
key to unlock the great mystery of the troubled state of 
mankind. 

Two fundamental intuitions surely lie at the root of 
the story of Eden and all other myths of the Golden Age— 
the intuition of a bliss potentially ours, and the intuition 
of a law we have transgressed. “The impulses of desire 
and of conscience together have made men dream of Para- 
dise as a thing humanity has lost. ‘The placing of it in the 
far past behind us is but a token of our feeling that God’s 
intention for us was altogether good and delightful. The 
blessed life is His original and abiding ideal. And it is 
our human defect of will which prevents its present realiza- 
tion. “The more man comes to trust in God as love almighty 
—able to control and re-shape to His own splendid purpose 
the vagaries and rebellions of human self-will—the more 
clearly will Eden loom up ahead of us as a state still to be 
won, Yet it must always seem a thing regained when we 
arrive at it. We shall have got to the place we were born 
to belong to. And so the pursuit of blessedness has always 
struck men as if it were the retrieving of a lost good, the 
return home after exile ; and the Eden we are bound for 
has been pictured on the far horizon behind us as the place 
we issued from. Just as a man driven to travel eastward 
sees the sun receding behind him as if it were to be irre- 
trievably lost, only to find after journeying through the 
darkness that the sun is in front of him again, so humanity 
has travelled onward feeling that its Golden Age had sunk 
behind it, while in reality its every step was bringing it 
nearer to that age’s dawn—rising in miraculous splendour 
upon undiscovered hills. 


16 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


But there is another more particular reason for thus 
placing the Golden Age behind us. And we can, perhaps, 
best appreciate this if we recall the corresponding Greek 
myth of how Paradise was lost, which in its essential features 
is so similar to the story of Adam and Eve. ‘The points 
in common between the two myths will give the clue to 
their underlying motive and significance. 

In the beginning of things, said the Greeks, all was good- 
ness and happiness. ‘There was no need to toil for a living, 
and nobody was ever ill and nobody grew old. In these 
delightful circumstances there lived two brothers, Prome- 
theus and Epimetheus. But the world was as yet without 
women. Prometheus, having occasion to go upon a long 
journey, warned his brother, whom he left behind, to 
beware of receiving any gift from the gods. But one day 
to Epimetheus in his solitude came Mercury, leading by 
the hand a beautiful girl named Pandora, whom he presented 
to Epimetheus, saying that the gods sent this gift so that 
he might not feel lonesome. \ Epimetheus promptly fell 
in love with her, and, forgetting his brother’s warning, 
took her into his cottage. Some days later Mercury appeared 
again carrying a heavy corded box, and asked permission 
to leave it for awhile in the cottage—only on no account 
was it to be opened. Epimetheus consented, and faithfully 
put the boxawayinacorner. But while he was out hunting, 
Pandora in her idleness began to wonder about that box; . 
and at last her curiosity became irrepressible. She thought 
there could be no harm in peeping; so she untied the 
knots and lifted the lid just a wee bit to glance inside. At 
once there flew out a swarm of winged insects which stung 
her distressingly, and stung Epimetheus too, who was at 
that moment entering the door. They hastily corded up 
the box again, but the damage was done: those insects 
flew all over the world, stinging every one. People began 
to quarrel; they began to have illnesses; they began to 
starve, for the fruits were spoilt. In fact, the Golden 


THE LOST EDEN 17 


Age was over, and human trouble had begun. ‘The only 
compensation was that a little creature called Hope had 
been left in the box. For some time it knocked unavail- 
ingly to be let out. But at last Pandora summoned courage 
to raise the lid again. Out flew the little white moth-like 
creature Hope, and went all over the world to undo the 
mischiefs of the evil imps. But, with all her efforts, ill 
could not be wholly banished, nor the innocent peace of 
the Golden Age won back. 

In this tale, as in that of the Garden of Eden, trouble 
comes upon mankind with the advent of woman, and through 
a woman’s curiosity. And surely, in either case, what is 
really implicit in the story is the drama of puberty. It is 
the dawning of sex-consciousness which, with all its per- 
turbations and introspective doubts and new explosive 
desires, puts an end to the innocent Eden of childhood and 
drives us out into the adult world of labour and anxiety, 
of pain and disillusionment. Childhood is cloistered, 
happily innocent, knowing nothing of good and evil, heedless 
of labour. Looking back to it from the perplexities and 
sorrows of maturity, it is as if we looked over into an old 
walled garden of fruits and flowers and smooth lawns where 
we lived at play long years since in what seemed eternal 
summers. “* Heaven lies about us in our infancy”; but 
we have travelled far since then, and “‘ we know, where’er 
we go, that there hath past away a glory from the earth.” 

Both these ancient tales are written with a masculine 
prejudice. But though they agree in laying blame upon 
the woman, this is but an accident due to the social bias 
of the ancient world; what they really emphasize 1s the 
disturbance and trouble which enter into human life with 
the consciousness of sex. “The world of childhood 1s sexless ; 
but with adolescence comes the recognized presence of 
woman by man, and of man by woman. There is the 
sense of a fascinating secret—a closed box, a forbidden 
fruit And when that secret is disclosed there dawns the 

2 


18 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


knowledge of good and evil, and with it the protective 
sense of shame. ‘This is not altogether true, but it is broadly 
true. Childhood no doubt has a rudimentary knowledge 
of good and evil, but this first becomes urgent—engrossingly 
and even oppressively urgent—in adolescence, when the 
awareness of sex and the power of sex begin to fill life with 
grave responsibility. It is then that the feeling of blunder, 
miscarriage and sin first begins to bring distressful self- 
reproach. Conscience awakes. We realize unexpected 
dangers in our very constitution. “The body, with its new- 
found passions, is seen to be perilous. And even the purest 
flowering of love into happy marriage brings the need of 
labour and self-denial—the sweat of toil and the pain of 
travail—in such a way as to take us intoa world far different 
from the cloistered garden of childhood. ‘That lies closed 
behind us for ever, beyond our power to re-enter. We are 
now in the wilderness where we must create our own oasis 
by stern resolution, or else wander in misery. Every boy 
is Adam, and every girl is Eve, and the closed gates of Eden 
with their flaming sword are the symbol of unrecoverable 
childhood. 

Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality is, 
in its dominant thought, a very close modern parallel to 
the old myth of Eden. ‘The same theme was beautifully 
treated in the seventeenth century by Vaughan : 


Happy those early days when I 
Shined in my angel-infancy ! 

Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race, 

Or taught my soul to fancy ought 
But a white, celestial thought ; 

When yet I had not walked above 

A mile or two from my first love, 
And looking back, at that short space 
Could see a glimpse of His bright face ; 
Before I taught my tongue to wound 
My conscience with a sinful sound, 
Or had the black art to dispense 

A several sin to every sense, 


THE LOST EDEN 1g 


But felt through all this fleshly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness ... . 
O how I long to travel back 

And tread again that ancient track ! 
But ah! my soul with too much stay 
Is drunk, and staggers in the way. 


In one sense Eden 1s lost in the process of our inevitable 
growth toward maturity, but a more tragic meaning is 
intended in the allegory in Genesis. We are all bound to 
pass out of moral ignorance into the knowledge of good 
and evil. So far is this from being against God’s will that 
it is evidently His deliberate design in the making of us. 
And the story of Eden has its moral effect a good deal 
blurred by the intrusion of the primitive fallacy about the 
jealousy of the gods at man’s growth. We must put that 
idea out of mind. God intends us to arrive at moral know- 
ledge ; and we cannot choose the good until we have per- 
ceivedevilasevil. Butissin, then, necessary to our growth ? 
Not if by sin we mean wilful transgression of a recognized 
law. And the Genesis story bases itself upon the fact 
that such wilful sin exists. Adam and Eve have already 
won the consciousness of good and evil in their awareness 
of God’s edict. But alas! men will not really learn save 
by bitter experience. “There must indeed be a process of 
trial and error which first reveals what is right ; that is the 
giving of the divine edict. But men have not been content 
to be so taught. “They have guiltily persisted in recognized 
wrong, and drawn upon themselves bitter penalties. It is 
this fact that the story of the Fall emphasizes. The sorrow 
of our lot comes through transgression—not merely through 
_blundering mismanagement of our experiments in life, 
but through wilful disobedience to laws already recognized 
and confessed. Error may be inevitable, as a child learns 
to walk by inevitable tumbles. But the Fall is not an 
error; itisacrime. The story of Eden does not attempt to 
explain philosophically the origin of sin; nor to fit the 
fact of sin into any theory of God’s providence or man’s 


20 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


evolution ; nor to trace the passage of error into guilt. It 
does not explain where the tempting serpent comes from, 
and why. It is content to press home the fact that man 
as he emerges out of the moral ignorance of infancy, becomes 
aware of a moral law in the world which he nevertheless 
disobeys ; and it is this deliberate disobedience which turns 
him out of his garden of peace. 

The great folk-tales of the world constantly press home 
the fact upon us that there are certain moral conditions 
laid down for our lifeson earth about which we have clear 
warning, and that all disaster comes from disregard of them. 
Cinderella must be strictly careful to return home before 
the clock strikes twelve; little Snowdrop must on no 
account whatever open the door to strangers ; Eve must not 
eat one particular sort of apple ;—or else disastrous trouble 
will follow. ‘There are things that may not be done with 
impunity in this world. We know this, yet we still do 
them. And it is this disobedience of ours that brings about 
such dismaying results. We lose Eden by a moral fall 
or fault, says Genesis. And that piece of sound ethic is 
echoed all through the folk-lore of the world. We do 
not only err; we disobey, and are ashamed of ourselves. 
‘That is surely the manly confession to make as against 
all foggy and equivocating attempts to explain away guilt 
as inevitable, and therefore negligible, error. Much wrong- 
doing in this world is mere error. But man is not entirely 
this innocent and misguided fool. He can sin with open 
eyes. And he does so sin. ‘The Fall of Man happens 
every day. And. it is this open-eyed sin which Genesis 
seizes upon as the one outstanding cause of all our woe. 

The story of Eden preaches no gospel; it only sym- 
bolizes the facts which make a gospel necessary. Humpty- 
dumpty has had a great fall on this earth, and made a sorry 
mess of it ; everywhere we look we see the spattered tokens 
of his sprawling folly. And not all the king’s horses and 
all the king’s men can contrive to put him together again 


THE LOST EDEN 21 


There is a way out of the ruin, but only through the grace 
of God, not through mere human ingenuity. “ ‘Not by 
might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ saith the Lord.” 
It needs a new spirit infused into us by God to lift us from 
our falls. But that Spirit isavailable ; and because of it Hope 
is on the wing among us, healing and mending our sick 
and broken lives. “We fall to rise,” says Browning. 
So, with God’s grace, it may be. And hence Genesis 
points on to the Apocalypse, where the tree of life, guarded 
from us now by flaming cherubims, shall be discovered 
again at last in the midst of the City that descends from 
heaven—to whose citizenship we are all called; whose 
gates shall not be shut at all by day, and there is no night 
there ; it stands wide open—the inheritance of all penitent 
and upward-striving souls. 

If man falls, God stoops after him ; and the world that 
might have been is still the world that may be. ‘That is 
our hope. It is no use slurring over our guilt. We have 
sinned by our own fault, our own most grievous fault. But 
God’s grace is stronger than our wilfulness; and the 
world, which our wanton folly has brought to such ruin, 
shall, by that grace of His, be restored. 

Those who hold this New Testament faith must needs 
be bent upon confirming with it the young adolescent 
hearts that feel the first shocks of temptation and failure. 
These boys and girls in their early ’teens, thrust out of 
their untroubled Eden of childhood, need much wise 
strengthening, much reassurance that good is in store for 
them; that with God’s help they may win a path to that 
tree of life they seem to have lost; guarded, indeed, now 
by sword of flame from all indolent and cowardly folk 
travelling the paths of vain regret or heedless frivolity, 
but not from those who prayerfully face toward that City 
of Open Gates where God abides. Some rite of confirmation 
should surely be practised as a means of grace to those who 
stand on the threshold of youth. All the great religions 


22 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


have marked out that period of growth as a time for some 
special effort to establish young life in right courses. Adoles- 
cence cries out for help, and the wisdom, no less than the 
tenderness, of the adult world will strive to give that help, 
and bring a special grace of the Holy Spirit to guide the 
young as they cross the bar out of childhood’s harbour 
into the open sea of the world’s life with all its rough and 
tumble, its perilous currents and storms. No doubt our 
services of Confirmation may often enough be very lame 
and shallow ceremonies. But the sacrament, in its essential 
idea and purpose, is exceedingly precious, and we neglect 
or misuse it at great cost to the wholesomeness and safety 
of the growing generations. “These young creatures 
passing out of Eden, conscious of coming toil and battle, 
with such a storage of fair dreams, and such a shrinking 
from ugly realities—it would be a cruel thing if the adult 
world did not stretch out a helping hand, if it had no en- 
couraging and enlightening message to offer, if it had no 
power to convey some measure of God’s grace to them. 

But the Christian Church, in so far as it be Christian, 
has this power. It knows well the fact of Paradise Lost, 
but it preaches the promise of Paradise Regained. It 
knows the sternness of the closed gates, the human irre- 
trievability of lost innocence, but it points to where a City 
of Life descends from heaven upon earth—a thing not 
built by man’s merit but given by God’s grace, into which 
men may enter ransomed from their falls, 

And so it bids youth go forward, trusting not in its own 
strength but in the power of God’s Spirit: ‘‘ Defend, 
O Lord, this thy child with thy heavenly grace that he 
may continue thine for ever; and daily increase in thy 
Holy Spirit, more and more, until he come unto thy ever- 
lasting kingdom.” 

In such faith, and under such blessing, our youth may 
leave behind the garden of childhood without fear, and in 
the twin graces of penitence and hope be made strong to 


THE LOST EDEN 23 


take its share in preparing in the wilderness of this faulty 
world the foundations upon which shall descend the Holy 
City ; in the midst of the street of which, and on either 
side of the river, grows the tree of life whose leaves are 
for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no 
more curse. 





II 


THE MESSAGE OF 
THE RAINBOW 


I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall come to pass, when I bring 
a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: and I 
will remember my covenant which is between me and you; and the 
waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. 
GENESIS 1X. 13-15. 


Look upon the rainbow, and praise Him that made it ; 

Very beautiful it is in the brightness thereof. 

It compasseth the heaven about with a glorious circle, 

And the hands of the most High have bended it. 
ECCLESIASTICUS xlili. 11, 12. 


II 
THE MESSAGE OF THE RAINBOW 


MONG the mountains of western China there is 
to be seen a marvel which the Chinese call the Fo- 
Kuang or Glory of Buddha. A certain peak among these 
mountains is flanked by a precipitous cliff more than a mile 
in height. And as one looks over the edge of this appalling 
precipice, there is to be seen at times—according to the 
narrative of Englishmen who have witnessed it, as recorded 
in the transactions of the Royal Geographical Society—“ a 
sunlike disc, enclosed in a ring of prismatic colours more 
closely blended than in the rainbow.” ‘This brilliant 
apparition is only visibie when the precipice is clothed in 
mist. The disc of light appears to lie on the surface of 
the mist, and is always in the direction of a line drawn from 
the sun through the heads of the observers. It is a curiously 
reflected image of the sun, and the enclosing prismatic 
ring is a species of rainbow. But devout Buddhists assert 
that it is all an emanation from the aureole of Buddha. 
A rather similar phenomenon has often been observed 
by travellers among the Ghats in southern India. ‘There, 
too, is a spot overlooking a deep precipice; and, with a 
fog hanging in the valley up to the level of the observer, 
this is what may be seen, as it is recorded by one traveller : 
“I was placed at the edge of the precipice, just without 
the limits of the fog, and with a cloudless sun at my back 
at a very low elevation. Under such a combination of 
favourable circumstances the circular rainbow appeared 


quite perfect, of the most vivid colours—one half above the 
27 


28 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


level on which I stood, the other half below it. Shadows 
in distinct outline of myself, my horse, and people appeared 
in the centre of the circle, as a picture to which the bow 
formed a resplendent frame. My attendants were in- 
credulous that the figures they saw under such extraordinary 
circumstances could be their own shadows, and they tossed 
their arms and legs about, and put their bodies into various 
positions, to be assured of the fact by the corresponding 
movements of the objects within the circle; and it was 
some little time ere the superstitious feeling with which 
the spectacle was viewed wore off.” 

I dare say these stories could be multiplied if one sought 
for parallels in other parts of the world; but they are 
enough to bring before one’s imagination the marvels with 
which Nature provokes our curiosity and awe; and to 
mark, too, the inevitable tendency of the human mind, 
untrained in scientific investigation, to jump to some fanciful 
explanation of such phenomena, and to hedge them about 
with superstitious reverence. When in touch with such 
stories one feels that one is close to the heart of the primi- 
tive folk who wove the myth of the Great Flood and the 
First Rainbow. What that very peculiar and dazzling 
spectacle called the Glory of Buddha is to a Buddhist China- 
man, so must every rainbow have been to the folk of the 
early world. It was sheer miracle, utterly beyond under- 
standing or scientific surmise. All that a man could say 
was that it belonged to the gods. Some, e.g. the Chaldeans, 
declared that it must be the deity’s necklace. Others, e.g. 
the Greeks, spoke of it as a bridge by which the gods travelled 
across the heavens. Others looked at the bows they used 
in fighting and hunting, and declared that the brilliant 
arch of light was, of course, the war-bow of a warrior 
god. ‘This was the best they could do in the way of explana- 
tion. ‘The apparition belonged to the inscrutable powers 
overhead. It was yet another sign of their awful marvellous- 
ness ; and all that man could do was to bow in the dust, 


THE MESSAGE OF THE RAINBOW — 29 


and hold up his pathetic little offerings so that the Shining 
Ones might be kind to him. 

But a thought of mercy, an emotion of hope was induced 
—perhaps everywhere, and certainly among the old 
Israelites—by this beautiful apparition in the midst of storm, 
The contrast of its delicate brightness with the black fury 
of cloud behind it, and its opportune arrival just as the 
storm breaks up, seemed like a signal of hope and a promise 
of the merciful beneficence that dwelt in the heavens 
despite all tempest. “That radiant arch filled men with 
delight and admiration even in the midst of all the. dis- 
comfort and peril of savage weather. It restored their 
spirits, as daybreak does to a sleepless sufferer or to ship- 
wrecked outcasts upon the sea. Anyone can be cheerful 
with the return of light; but here was not light only, but 
colour most gorgeous and most tender, woven by super- 
human wizardry, and curved with exquisite grace and vast 
breadth of power from horizon to horizon. A _ world 
with so stupendously beautiful an object in it might surely 
be trusted—an object born out of the very bosom of the 
storm itself. What could it indicate, this triumph of 
magical light over grim darkness, save the merciful good- 
will of the Eternal Power? ‘When I bring a cloud over 
the earth, my bow shall be seen in the cloud; ‘and the 
waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.” 
Thus it seemed to their hearts that God spake. 

And even we sophisticated people of to-day must, I 
think, be similarly touched if we let our imaginations dwell 
for a little on this marvel of the rainbow.. When science 
has done all it can to explain its origin, the thing still remains 
as surprising as any magic and lovelier than any deliberate 
art. It is next to. impossible to look at its radiant grace and 
not incline to believe it the work of a Mind that is careful 
for beauty ; no wild and savage power bent upon destruction, 
but a calm and dexterous power bent upon construction, 
determined to draw forward and exalt our human spirits 


30 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


by flashes of unearthly beauty. Keats, in his Lamia, 
complains that rationalistic philosophy dispels the sense 
of the supernatural : 

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven ; 

We know her woof, her texture; she is given 

In the dull catalogue of common things. 

Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, 

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 

Empty the haunted air, the gnomed mine, 

Unweave a rainbow. 

But such is not the deepest philosophy. You may 
explain the whole process of the refraction of light, the 
prismatic action of the falling raindrops, and the geometrical 
laws that govern the shape of the bow ; but still the heart 
replies : “‘ from worlds not quickened by the sun a portion 
of the gift is won.” For this thing has communications 
to make with the emotions as well as with the analysing 
intellect. We are as sure that joy and confidence flow 
from it as that certain laws of physics govern its appearing. 
It reveals a world of spiritual values as certainly as the 
spectroscope discovers new substances or the telescope 
new stars. It is what it looks to be—a bridge between 
heaven and earth. And our hearts echo the truth expressed 
in the old Homeric hymn where it is Iris, the rainbow, who 
brings to Demeter, the earth-mother, the message of Zeus, 
assuring her of the good-will of the god of the stormy sky 
toward her, and so bridging over the gulf of estrangement 
between earth and heaven. 

The story of the Great Deluge, with which the message 
of the rainbow is associated, has its parallels, as is well known, 
scattered over the greater part of the world—in Babylon 
and Greece, in India and Malay, in the Pacific Islands, 
and up and down the length and breadth of the American 
Continent. Whether due to legendary reminiscence of 
disastrous local floods, or to mythic fancy playing around 
the discovery of fossil shells among the inland mountains, 
or whether it be due merely to humanity’s vast surprise at 


THE MESSAGE OF THE RAINBOW — 31 


the ocean, kept now within safe boundaries like a tamed 
beast in a kennel, but kept there man knows not how, save 
that it be by God’s mercy; whether due to any or all 
of these causes no one can accurately declare, but the Deluge 
Story is probably the most widespread myth on earth. It 
is a little surprising that no comparable myths have arisen 
about destruction by volcanic fire or by hurricane or pesti- 
lence, “The destruction of Sodom, or the destruction of the 
host of Sennacherib, are Biblical examples, but they do not 
rise to the appalling proportions of the story of the Deluge. 
Flood is the catastrophe which has most indelibly impressed 
itself on the imagination of mankind. After all, any other 
catastrophe —even earthquake—does leave solid ground 
beneath our feet. But with the very earth submerged, the 
last hope of man disappears. So it was upon the catastrophe 
of deluge that human fear focused itself, as the one supremely 
dreadful catastrophe among all the various perils with which 
human life is threatened. One wonders whether the 
ancient traditions of deluge can have had some faint reminis- 
Cent connection with the enormous changes in the earth’s 
surface—the changes from sea to dry land, and from dry 
land to sea—which are the axioms of modern geology, and 
over against which all minor accidents of the historic period 
appear negligible. It appears, to me at least, that no mere 
local floods are adequate to account for the flood myth. 
One seems to see in it rather the terror of ocean, and the 
very natural thought that we see in the ocean the dwindled 
remains of a once all-engulfing water. Otherwise, why 
should the sea exist at all? The simplest explanation of 
it that occurred to primitive man was that God had once 
upon a time made up his mind to drown the world; and 
the sea, kept in its place now by God’s mercy, was the relic 
and everlasting reminder of that awful doom, while the 
rainbow was the divine pledge that henceforward the dry 
land should be kept safe. 


This promise of the rainbow which is given as an appendix 


32 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


to the flood myth is, perhaps, a later addition to the tale 
But there are one or two hints in the old Babylonian litera- 
ture which suggest an early connection of the rainbow 
myth with the flood myth, and so it 1s probable that our 
Hebrew writer was working upon ancient material in this 
appendix as in the main story itself. And he works upon 
it nobly. He, with his strong sense of a Providence in 
history, his conviction of a divine covenant with man, 
seizes upon the rainbow as the culminating fact in the whole 
tale of the Deluge. Whatever the horror of flood may 
signify, more significant still to him is the message of the 
bow—that there shall be an escape for humanity from divine 
dooms ; that God’s design for man is merciful; that the 
last word shall not be destruction, but survival and peace. 
“I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token 
of a covenant between me and the earth.” 

We are set upon an earth capable of staggering frightful- 
ness. Hurricane and earthquake, flood, famine, and 
pestilence make our life here a very precarious venture. 
And in our heavy troubles we are quick to upbraid the 
Creator of so dangerous and painful a planet. Well! we 
cannot pretend to an adequate understanding of it all as 
yet; but if we keep our courage and sanity we can see 
that this hard training-ground is educating man toward 
the mastery of nature, and developing his powers as no 
soft lotos-eating world could do. Man is not a doomed 
creature. Along with the peril there is a promise of 
escape. He sees not yet all things put under him; but he 
is on the road to conquest. And his advance has come just 
through that necessity of struggle with grim natural forces 
which were inexplicably dreadful to him in the childhood 
of the race. Now he can afford to view them more serenely. 
He begins to see that the discipline of earth is not meaningless 
or wantonly cruel. It has served a purpose—a purpose 
which, when fulfilled, may completely justify the process, 
And to-day we can look back with a pleased surprise, as 


THE MESSAGE OF THE RAINBOW — 33 


we look upon courage in a child, to the brave hope of those 
early forefathers who, amid flood and tempest, saw in the 
rainbow a token of divine covenant that the purpose of 
the world was good. 

Tyndall tells how once, on a foggy night in the Alps, 
he opened a door at the end of a passage in the house where 
he was staying and looked out into the gloom. Behind 
him there was hanging a small lamp by which the shadow 
of his body was cast upon the fog. And sweeping round 
the shadow was a pale white luminous circle. As he walked 
out into the fog this curious halo went in advance of him. 
In his playful way he comments, “ Had not my demerits 
been so well known to me, I might have accepted the pheno- 
menon as an evidence of canonization.” Yes! for so the 
true saints of this world go forth through the darkness of 
its yet inexplicable sorrows and perils embraced in a divine 
light of faith and hope. God’s halo surrounds the saint, 
not because he is the only man so encircled by the promises 
and providence of God, but because he is the only man 
who is fully aware of being so surrounded. He has the 
eye of faith to see what our purblind distrustfulness cannot 
see, And he therefore walks through the fog and tempest 
ef our earthly experience illumined with hope, encircled 
by protecting rays that guide him through the gloom, And 
of such an one we say, as Rossetti said of his hero in Hand 
and Soul, “‘ Seeing his face in front, there was a glory upon 
it, as upon the face of one who feels a light round his hair.” 

There come to all of us in this world hours of deep gloom 
when it is most difficult to be hopeful. It may be that 
some untoward circumstance brings economic disaster 
upon us unexpectedly, and the whole fruit of a life’s labour 
seems perished. We have to begin at the beginning again, 
when our youthful zest and exuberance are gone, and we 
have no heart for the task. And the bleak comfortless 
prospect looks like a shoreless sea to a drowning man. It 
may be that we are concerned in some spiritual strife, battling 


3 


34 _ THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


for some forlorn hope of reform or amelioration, and against 
us flows the heavy tide of popular custom and prejudice, 
How futile all the effort seems! It is as if we tried to 
plough the ocean, The wide waste of human inertia 
spreads far around us, seemingly impenetrable ; the black 
clouds of intolerance and resentment gather overhead, 
and perhaps break at last in a fury of persecution, “The 
heavens above us are lead, and the earth beneath us a stone, 
and it seems as if we should be crushed between them as 
prisoners are said to have been crushed to death in the old 
grim days by the slow sinking of their cell’s roof. It may 
be that death has ravaged our household and torn away 
a life that seemed part and parcel of our own, till our whole 
being is left in shreds and tatters, and we are dazed and sick 
as if with the loss of our own blood. It may be that some 
awtul public catastrophe, some abnormal explosion of social 
wickedness—as in the days of Nero, or the Paris guillotine, 
or the German war of yesterday—has knocked all our plans 
and hopes to pieces like a child’s brick palace, until we seem 
to be left alive merely upon a dust-heap of ruined ideals. 
Or it may be that even in calm weather, with a fair and 
prosperous world about us, we are inwardly seized, we 
know not how or why, by unaccountable humours of 
dreadful apprehension that fasten upon us like a disease 
and blacken our universe from pole to pole. In such hours, 
when the little ark of our hopes is drifting across the bewilder- 
ing waters of a sunk or drowning world, faith alone can 
light up the prospect and 


Trace the rainbow through the rain 
And feel the promise is not vain 
That morn shall tearless be. 


To the faithful even then the light shines about their heads ; 
the inky blackness is transfigured by the miraculous seven- 
fold arc of colour ; and they discover in the midst of their 
suffering an incredible boon of beauty and of peace—a 


THE MESSAGE OF THE RAINBOW 35 


revelation of God’s everlasting mercy. ‘They are enabled 
to see that the flood is not a final disaster to destroy all 
flesh ; it is buta baptism and purgation of the earth whence 
life shall rise again young and new. 

God moves in a mysterious way 

His wonders to perform : 


He plants His footsteps in the sea, 
And rides upon the storm. 


Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take ; 
The clouds ye so much dread 

Are big with mercy, and shall break 
In blessings on your head. 


Wonderful is the power of faith to transmute grief into 
glory, darkness into light! The Happy Warrior, when 
doomed to go in company with pain and fear and bloodshed, 
turns his necessity to glorious gain : 

Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves 
Of their bad influence and their good receives... . 
And he, if he be called upon to face 

Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined 
Great issues, good or bad, for human kind, 


Is happy as a lover; and attired 
With sudden brightness, 


—with the aureole of faith. 

Faith is a determination to estimate life valiantly and 
hopefully—to cling on to the tokens of good-will therein 
until what is dark to us becomes luminous and we know 
as we are known. The more persistent our faith, the 
more grounds we find for faith to rest upon. 

But every man must make his first act of faith as if he 
were stepping to a great adventure. There is enough hope 
of reward to draw him onward, but only by experience can. 
he discover the greatness of the wealth to be won. 

But faith for ever justifies itself. To the brave and 
loyal the storm always does end in a glory of magical light. 
After crucifixion, resurrection. It is precisely through 
these deep glooms and perils that our spirits win their finest 


36 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


insight. By these things we come to see the hidden marvels 
of spiritual fortitude and power, the invincibility of the 
soul. “In the fell clutch of circumstance my head is 
bloody but unbowed.” Such a cry represents the first- 
fruits of victory—a defiant trust in one’s own spirit. But 
therein is planted the root of a gospel of reconciliation by 
which we come to estimate the purpose of the world in 
the light of these spiritual results, and to understand that 
what seemed to be the assault of an implacable enemy 
was after all nothing but the discipline of a love which 
knows us better than we know ourselves. Without rain 
and mist you can have no “ Bridge of the Gods,” no “ Glory 
of Buddha.” And without the floods and waterspouts of 
trial and suffering you can have no reconciling spiritual 
illumination, no aureole of victorious sanctity. It is true 
enough that some men may be worsened by hardship ; but 
men of faithful courage are not worsened by it. “They are 
cradled into holiness by it, as Shelley said others were “‘ cradled 
into poetry by wrong, and learnt in suffering what they 
taught in song.” 

Let us have courage to trust this world then—a world 
flashing with rainbows amidst its clouds and glooms, physical 
and spiritual wonders standing out of the most black and 
bitter circumstances to dazzle us with revelation of the 
grace enshrined at the heart of things. Let the magic 
rainbow be to us, as to old Israel, a symbol of God’s covenant 
with humanity. This brilliant ethereal creature born of 
the marriage of light and water; this fairy tapestry hung 
in heaven ; this sudden elusive apparition which our hearts 
leap to behold, is a sign from the Almighty, a promise 
of the ultimate beatitude of life. 

Life on this planet, as Shakespeare visioned it in his mature 
reflection, is like the experience of mariners tossed up by 
tempest on an unknown isle—flung in disorderly rout upon 
it, and left to devise what schemes they can for comfort. 
But there is a hidden enchantment that guides them through 


THE MESSAGE OF THE RAINBOW — 37 


many bewildering mazes—startling them at whiles by 
evanescent flashes of unearthly light and uncapturable 
strains of heavenly music, but leading them at length to 
safety and reconcilation and love and home. Some of 
them play the coward and fool besottedly, and so get them- 
selves into endless avoidable difficulties. But Prospero, 
the lord of the isle, has his way with them, and his purposes 
prevail. And so after Tempest there comes Peace. ‘That 
is Shakespeare’s last reading of earth. And we will believe 
with him that our tempest-smitten world is but the vestibule 
to a place of enchanted peace, from which even now light 
and music stream down upon us at odd moments, and in 
which, at length, all mysteries shall be cleared away and 
the radiant light of God encircle us for ever. 


“aS 


ne oe 4 
far ihe hee 
he vale iinet 





it 
a 


ee 
AS pa iaetony 





And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top 
may reach unto heaven ; and let us make us a monument, lest we be 
scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came 
down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one 
language ; and this they begin todo: and now nothing will be restrained 
from them which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, 
and there confound their language, that they may not understand one 
another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon 
the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 

GENESIS xi. 4-8. 


And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with 
one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven 
as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were 
sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, 
and it sat upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the 
Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave 
them utterance. 

ACTS il. 1-4. 


Ill 


BABEL AND PENTECOST 


HE Chaldeans used to build their temples in the form 

of pyramids which drew their eyes skyward as do 
the steeples of our Christian churches. These pyramids, or 
ziggurats as they were called, were not built in the same way 
as the pyramids of Egypt. They were built up by a dwindling 
series of square-walled platforms, each one standing in the 
midst of a larger one beneath it—exactly like those nests 
of wicker boxes that fit one within the other, if these are 
separated out and piled up in series with the littlest at the 
top. Each stage—of which there were probably seven as 
a rule—was painted a different colour, black for the bottom 
one, then orange, crimson, gold, azure, and so on to the 
summit. On the top platform stood the shrine, with its 
statue of the god; while a great retinue of priests lived in 
various chambers in the lower stories. “These temple- 
pyramids were used, too, as observatories, for the Chaldean 
religion made astrology its handmaid; and this was a 
particular reason for elevating the temples far into the 
clearness of the sky. 

In those low-lying marshy plains of Babylonia it was 
the custom to raise huge mounds, forty or fifty feet high, 
as foundations on which to build the palaces and temples. 
There are no natural elevations, and yet for the sake of 
health and safety it was necessary to raise one’s buildings 
above the levei of floods and fevers. Hence these enormous 


mounds—the ruins of which are still to be seen—were 
41 


42 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


piled up. ‘They must have required the labour of many 
thousands of slaves working for many years. It is a labour 
prodigious to contemplate and wellnigh incredible. Yet 
these enormous hand-made hills seem to have been erected 
in profusion. Almost every sovereign made it a point of 
honour to build himself a new palace, and this would 
frequently entail a new hill-foundation. But there may 
have been sufficient material cause for this multiplication 
of new palaces ; for these hills, though walled on the outside 
by excellent baked brick cemented with: bitumen, were 
internally mere rubbish-heaps of crude brick and earth, 
which soon cracked and sank under the influence of the 
weather, so that the buildings erected upon them cannot 
have had a very prolonged life. Old Chaldea must have 
been full of these fallen and derelict buildings, standing 
forlornly on their disintegrating mounds. ‘The ruins of 
one great pyramid-temple may still be seen at the famous 
mound of Birs-Nimrud at Borsip, close to Babylon. It has 
for long centuries been identified with the Tower of Babel, 
though there are other claimants to that title which are 
preferred by some modern researchers. ‘The tower at 
Borsip was a ruin in Nebuchadnezzar’s day, and he claims 
to have restored it, mentioning that its original design had 
never until then been completed. It was very large, and 
reached a height of rather more than a hundred and fifty 
feet. Whether or no this is the actual building whose 
unfinished and ruinous condition gave rise to the story 
of the Tower of Babel is problematical and not very 
important. But it was obviously the sight of some such | 
huge building, incomplete and deserted, which gave point 
tonthe tales ne 

Whether the story in Genesis has an earlier parallel in 
Babylonian literature seems a little uncertain. George 
Smith, who first recovered the Chaldean version of the 
flood story and made so many other notable finds among the 
British Museum tablets, got hold of what seemed likely 


BABEL AND PENTECOST 43 


to be a version of this story ; but it was too fragmentary 
to decipher with any certainty. Such a version, however, 
is given, it 1s said, among the surviving fragments of a 
history of Babylonia written by an ancient Greek scholar, 
Berosus, for the benefit of his master Alexander the Great ; 
and Berosus’s story may very likely have come from some 
old Chaldean writing now lost. But the Genesis story 
reflects the mental outlook of nomad tribes, not city dwellers 
like the Chaldeans, who are not likely to have seen anything 
morally culpable in the building of sky-scrapers such as 
stood around them every day. ‘The legend of the fall of 
Babel must, it would seen, have originated among the 
wandering tent-dwellers to whom such great buildings 
looked like embodiments of intolerable human pride, which 
God must needs punish. 

And we can properly appreciate the moral emphasis of 
the story only when we feel our way backward into the 
point of view of the ancient nomad. Constantly face 
to face as he was with the ungovernable forces of nature, 
feeling his utter dependence on the Lord of nature for 
his mere day-to-day existence, the nomad was shocked 
at the presumption which could dream of a permanent and 
secure dominion over nature, such as was symbolized -in 
these would-be everlasting structures of the city folk. And 
if he saw some such gigantic work crumbled and fallen, 
the moral to him would be clear : man had dared too much, 
and the divine wrath had punished his presumption. ‘To 
the nomad there was a sort of insolence or flippancy in 
all civilized life—as of people who will settle down in 
homes on the slopes of a volcano: it cannot be done with 
impunity. ‘These city-dwellers did not seem to him to 
realize the precariousness of their position in this world. 
And when it came to raising towers whose tops should 
‘reach the very dwelling-places of the gods—why, to these 
simple-minded folk it was sheer madness of wicked pride 
to dream of such a thing! Of course, God would never 


44. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 

tolerate such presumption. We men are on the earth 
by sufference, and we must not take liberties with our 
position, or forget how perilous and transient it is. 

The world has passed away from this standpoint alto- 
gether. We no longer look upon civilization, with its 
efforts after secure and permanent comfort, as an evidence 
of man’s overweening pride, an insulting challenge to the 
Lord of nature who wields thunderbolts and hurricanes. 
We believe it is God’s purpose for us to conquer nature, 
and make the earth secure for human life. God is with 
us, not against us, in that task. The establishment of 
civilization is not in itself an encroachment on the divine 
power, nor an example of wicked arrogance. But though, 
to our minds, the old nomads were wrong in their illus- 
tration, they were right in their principle that insolent 
pride is the arch-opponent of God and the root-cause of 
the disruption of society. It is the Satan whom God must 
for ever hurl down from heaven. And in its disconcerted 
wake come civil strife, “‘ red ruin and the breaking up of 
laws.” ‘The spirit which renounces humility and forgets 
the fear of God is the spirit which dissolves society into 
warring elements, and breaks the one body limb from limb, 

Centuries later the great prophet Isaiah also sawin Babylon 
a supreme type of human arrogance, and predicted its humi- 
liating overthrow at the hands of God: ‘‘ How art thou 
fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning ! how 
art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the 
nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend 
into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. 
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be 
like the Most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to 
hell, to the sides of the pit. ‘The Lord of Hosts shall make 
Babylon a possession for the bittern, and pools of water : 
and shall sweep it with the besom of destruction.” In that 
passage we have clearly stated the real lesson of the legend 
of Babel: it preaches the doom of pride. 


BABEL AND PENTECOST 45 


The ancient writers seized upon the fact of diversity 
of language as evidence of this curse of God upon pride, 
because such diversity was a natural symbol of social dis- 
ruption. It has puzzled primitive mankind everywhere, 
and there have been attempts in many quarters to account 
for it by myths more or less analogous to the story of Babel. 
Diversity of speech is no doubt the result rather than the 
cause of the dispersion and estrangement of peoples. It 
is probably true that very many races of men had their 
earliest homes in or about Mesopotamia. “That country 
was, perhaps, the chief cradle of the human race, the centre 
from which the great dispersions of mankind began. But the 
confusion of tongues did not precede the dispersion ; it 
followed upon it in the slow course of years. ‘The story 
of the confusion of tongues is, therefore, not true historically. 
But it is very true as allegory. We know to our cost that 
folk who speak the same language can be thorough aliens 
to one another. Yet in the deepest sense a common lan- 
guage does indicate a certain fundamental community 
of soul. Hence the arrogance that destroys society is well 
represented as being the destroyer of common speech : it 
breaks down the means of communication between heart 
and heart. And that is the cardinal sin—satanic presump- 
tion and self-will destroying human communion and creating 
a mad muddle of disunion in place of it. As the Holy 
Ghost in man means concord, fellowship, life, so the Satan 
in man means discord, war and death. Whether it exhibit 
itself as civil tyranny, or as religious intolerance, or as 
individual lust and greed, this arrogant self-will is the dis- 
ruptive element in society. Out of it comes nothing but 
confusion and overthrow. Age by age it foments the 
strife of tongues and threatens to bring to ruin the structure 
of civilization. | 

But we have an antidote to Babel. 

In an upper chamber on the roof of a Jewish house there 
sit together a little band of humble, contrite, wondering 


46 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


men—their memories stored with gracious, sad pictures 
of One now lost to sight whom they had deserted in the 
hour of His agony. In a passion of shame and revived 
loyalty they are met to make what amends they can and 
to carry on His work with such powers as they possess. 
The atmosphere is altogether one of humble contrition, 
of eager comradeship, of trembling hope. Each man’s 
heart is full of a new sense of mystic life and love. Selfish 
instincts of pride and fear are dead in them. God’s Holy 
Spirit fills them with love, joy, peace, long-suffering, 
patience, tenderness. And as they sit in fellowship, 
talking of past and future, planning how best to fulfil 
the commands of their Lord, encouraging each other with 
mutual zeal, they are caught into an ecstasy: they become 
transfigured, each one conscious of the spell of God upon 
him, each one feeling that veritable divine presence and 
impress as surely as if the hand of God were laid upon his 
head. ‘The very air about them seems like a living thing : 
it is as if a mighty wind blew about the house. ‘* And 
there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, 
and sat upon each of them. And they began to speak 
with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” 
And when a motley congregation of many nationalities 
gathered about them, their message was understood equally 
well by every one, says St. Luke. The doom of Babel 
was repealed. Just as in the ancient legend the devil’s 
spirit of arrogance in man had brought disintegration, 
confusion and social ruin, so in this story of Pentecost the 
divine spirit of love and humility in man brings understand- 
ing, communion and vital peace. In the pomp of Babel 
men’s mouths were filled with alien tongues ; in the meek- 
ness of Pentecost the alien tongues become a common lan- 
guage understood by all. And in place of warring races 
with contradictory aims you have the beginning of the 
Holy Catholic Church—that universal brotherhood built 
upon one loyalty, one faith, one baptism, deriving from, 


BABEL AND PENTECOST 47 


and living in, and moving to the one God and Father of 
all, who is above all, and through all, and in all. 

It is a difficult point to determine precisely what St. Luke 
understood by the g/ossolalia, or speaking in “other tongues.” 
Elsewhere in the New ‘Testament it clearly refers to a 
kind of-ecstatic utterance characteristic of the early Church, 
and, perhaps, partially reproduced at later periods of great 
evangelical revival. Such ecstatic speaking has been noted 
among the Franciscans, the Jansenists, the Quakers, the 
Methodists, the Irvingites. People are carried out of 
themselves by an emotional exaltation, and speak they 
know not what—an utterance which does not seem their 
own at all. In such speech the actual words may not 
be very intelligible. But the emotion which prompts the 
speech is intelligible enough, and bystanders may easily 
become deeply moved by it. “There is nothing to associate 
this gift of tongues with the use of foreign languages un- 
known to the speaker. But St. Luke’s usage of the term 
seems to suggest this miraculous character. Huis tendency 
to heighten the miraculous character of his stories is one of 
his obvious traits as an author. But there may have been 
special influences at work upon his narrative of the first 
Christian Pentecost. For we gather from Philo and other 
sources that it was supposed, in Jewish tradition, that when 
God revealed the Law on Sinai, He did so through the 
appearance of a flame from heaven, out of the midst of which 
sounded forth a voice. Further tradition declared that 
this original divine voice became seven voices, and from 
these was divided again into seventy separate tongues, so 
that there was a great host of voices proclaiming the Deca- 
logue, “‘like sparks leaping from an anvil,” presumably 
in order that peoples of different speech the world over 
might all understand this proclamation of Divine Law. 
And this episode of the proclamation of the Law was 
commemorated in Jewish ritual at the Feast of Pentecost, 
the concluding part of which was called the Feast of 


48. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


Trumpets, because it celebrated the time when there 
sounded from heaven ‘“‘a trumpet’s voice which reached 
forthwith to the ends of the universe.” S 

It can hardly be doubted that the association of these ideas 
with the Pentecostal Feast—the tradition of the descent 
of God symbolized in miraculous flames, and the inaugura- 
tion of the old covenant in world-wide language—has 
influenced St. Luke’s account of the inauguration of the 
Christian Church on the supposed anniversary of this ancient 
miracle. “The new Christian dispensation could not have 
had a less august and marvellous beginning than its 
predecessor. 

If the old Law had been proclaimed by myriad voices 
for the benefit of all mankind, then surely the new Gospel 
had been proclaimed in no more restricted fashion, And 
St. Luke had fact enough to go upon in his assertion that 
folk from many provinces had understood and accepted the 
glad tidings. Doubtless they did so, not because the apostles 
suddenly spoke in various foreign languages, but because 
the ecstatic talk of these inspired men was understood well 
enough in its general meaning—the emotion of it was 
caught, even if its dialect was strange to many of the listeners. 
As a matter of fact, Greek, in its various dialects, was spoken 
throughout the long list of countries enumerated by Luke, 
and an address in Greek would have been understood by 
them all. One’s conclusion is, then, that the g/ossolalia 
of Pentecost is identical with the glossolalia of the Epistles. 
Only in course of time, as the story of this supreme episode 
was handed about, it took on a stronger colouring of the 
miraculous. ‘The general understanding of the apostles’ 
ecstatic talk by the diverse crowd came to be thought of as 
the result of a miraculous communication of foreign lan- 
guages; and that shape of the story has influenced St. 
Luke’s narrative. “There was an unconscious transforma- 
tion of the facts of the case, probably influenced by the 
traditional legends associated with Pentecost. 


BABEL AND PENTECOST * 49 


If the people gathered at Jerusalem had been even more 
diverse in speech than was really the case, they might still 
have appreciated something of the apostle’s meaning, albeit 
the actual words were foreign to them. We are told that 
when St. Vincent Ferrer, the Spanish missionary, was 
preaching to crowds of foreigners he managed to make his 
Spanish talk intelligible to Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians, 
or Belgians alike, by reason of the passion and dramatic 
vividness of his eloquence. “The whole man spoke: it 
was no mere matter of words. St. Francis Xavier laid 
the foundations of Christianity in India and beyond it, 
despite little or no knowledge of the languages of the lands 
he came to. After all, words are but one instrument of 
communication. And sympathy is a wonderfully good 
interpreter: where good-will exists there can be no im- 
passable barriers of dumbness and unintelligibility. 

Hence in this great narrative of Pentecost, which is the 
central, lasting symbol of the descent of God’s Spirit into 
the souls of men, the pre-eminent feature is the breaking 
down of the barriers of alien speech, the welding of diverse 
peoples into a single communion. Pentecost marks, as 
it were, the pole of a spiritual current opposite to that of 
Babel. It signalizes a revolution from the era of estrange- 
ments and wars and sectional animosity to the era of recon- 
ciliation and peace and catholicism ; from the kingdoms 
of this world to the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. 
And so, year by year, at Whitsuntide we give thanks for 
the gracious descent of the Holy Ghost into humanity, 
by which our disruptive, deadly self-love is slowly being 
replaced by the fellowship of the love of God. ‘The story 
of Pentecost is the symbol and promise of God’s new era 
for man. 

Yet, age after age—and so appallingly in this our own 
_age—we see the resurgence of aggressive arrogance, always 
bringing in its wake some intolerable distress. The 
Czarisms and Kaiserisms plunge the world into war. 


4 


50 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


Military dictation works havoc in Armenia and the Congo, 
in Korea and in Ireland. Hymns of hate are gustfully 
sung. International treaties are written with fear at the 
elbow and vengeance holding the pen. We out-babel 
Babel. But amid all the satanic clamour of presumptuous 
selfishness against God’s commonwealth, we turn our 
memories to Pentecost, where a real historic event took 
place, a beginning of incalculable moment, which must and 
shall find its fulfilment in the complete transformation of 
the world; and we still pin our faith and hope to that uni- 
versal fellowship which God’s Spirit is urgent to bring to 
pass on earth. Just as in those early hours of the Christian 
Church the believers had all things in common, establishing 
an equal fraternity, so in the fulness of time all human beings, 
having also come to believe in common, shall enjoy an 
equal fraternity. “Chese hostile groups of armed nations, 
these cherished hatreds, these cries for vengeance, these 
despotic dragoonings of weaker folks—all our Babylonian 
presumption in every damnable form thereof—shall be 
swept away by the besom of divine wrath. And then shall 
all alienating barriers be broken down ; or, as the Apocalypse 
puts it, ‘‘there shall be no more sea.”? ‘There shall be 
but one heart and one speech among all men. There 
shall be the Commonwealth of God, founded in meekness, 
good-will and humility. We need continually to set our 
hearts afresh upon this ideal, and to be no whit dismayed 
by its apparent temporary overthrows. ‘The world does 
move onward into unity, and the last word about it is not 
Babel but Pentecost, not disunion but communion, not 
estrangement but understanding, not war but peace. 

The law of human progress, as Henry George maintains 
in his Progress and Poverty, is association in equality. 
Human advance depends upon our drawing together and 
forgetting our alienations and suspicions. But this in 
turn depends upon our endeavouring after equality in our 
relationships. History is one long illustration of how, when 


BABEL AND PENTECOST 51 


inequality has prevailed in society, decay and disruption 
have followed. One after another the older civilizations 
have thus been ruined. ‘The arrogant claims of individuals 
and classes have undermined the democratic fellowship, 
and the inevitable penalty has then fallen from heaven. 
This is the chief key to a right understanding of history. 
You may judge the rise and fall of nations by applying to 
them this maxim: “The principle of human progress is 
association in equality.” Wherever and whenever a 
blustering, domineering, supercilious, or privilege-loving 
caste arises, the common weal is broken and the state is 
doomed. Wherever and whenever justice, sympathy, 
forbearance, civic serviceableness, and kindred virtues pre- 
vail, then you see prosperity and vital growth. The builders 
of Babel are always scattered, but the meek shall inherit 
the earth. 

Let those who call themselves by the Christian name, 
who look back gratefully to those first beginnings of the 
Christian society through so stupendous an outpouring 
of the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the power of that 
Spirit to weld all mankind into one body, grasp firmly this 
Pentecostal ideal, and hold it up in the midst of men’s 
strife and prejudice until the nolse of Babel dies away ; 
and in the quietness of reconciliation we begin to see the 
flame of God’s Presence burning about the heads of our 
fellow-men, and to hear them talking in a speech we under- 
stand—heart calling to heart far deeper than the reach of 
any words—until we be joined with them in a holy unity, 
where the Christ is all and in all. From that upper room 
in Jersusalem the blessed contagion has been spreading all 
these centuries, with many an arrest, indeed, but with many 
a revival too. It cannot fail, it cannot cease, until God’s 
purpose is accomplished and the whole world incorporated 
by the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, 





IV 


AN INTERCESSION 
FOR SODOM 


Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone 
and fire from the Lord out of heaven ; and he overthrew those cities, 
and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of those cities, and that which 
grew upon the ground. 


GENESIS Xix. 24, 25. 


And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous 
with the wicked? . . . That be far from thee to do after this manner, 
to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should 
be as the wicked, that be far from thee: shall not the Judge of all the 
earth do right? ... Peradventure ten righteous shall be found there. 
And the Lord said, I will not destroy it for ten’s sake. 

GENESIS XVill. 23, 25, 32. 


IV 
AN INTERCESSION FOR SODOM 


HE great trench of the Jordan valley is the most 

extraordinary geological formation on earth. There 
are one or two areas in Asia and Africa which sink below 
sea-level : the neighbourhood of the Caspian Sea touches 
a depth of a hundred and fifty feet below the ocean, and 
the salt marshes of the Sahara sink over a hundred feet 
farther still. “These are the most notable depressions 
apart from the Jordan valley. But they are altogether 
dwarfed by the latter. ‘This great uncanny gash into the 
bowels of the earth reaches, at its lowest point in the bed 
of the Dead Sea, a depth of some two thousand six hundred 
feet beneath the oceansurface. And this depth is reached not 
in a broad gradually shelving valley, but by precipitous 
shuddering descent into a narrow cutting only a few miles 
across. “The two great limestone ridges on either side of 
1t—the hills of Palestine and of Moab, which are carried 
on northward into the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon—being 
formed countless ages ago at the bottom of the ocean, were 
apparently squeezed upward by lateral pressure through the 
earth’s shrinkage until they rose above water leaving between 
them a narrow arm of the sea stretching up from the Indian 
Ocean into the Lebanon valley. Then by a prodigious 
crack or fault the bed of this narrow sea sank as if it were 
falling into the bottomless pit, while a ridge of limestone 
squeezed up transversely across the southern end of it shut 
out the ocean, cutting off its lower reaches where we now 


see the Gulf of Akabah, and left a salt lake two hundred 
55 


56 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


miles in length. ‘This lake freshened in the course of 
time, as the glaciers of Lebanon melted into it, and there- 
after began to dry up—the different beach-levels being still 
traceable up and down its banks, and suggesting sudden 
subsidences due to volcanic disturbance rather than a steady 
imperceptible shrinkage. And so at last that unique 
chasm in the earth’s surface reached its present form of a 
sub-tropical valley deepening steeply southward, with its 
two lakes at the northern end and its swiftly tumbling 
river—the Jordan or Down-comer—pouring itself into 
the great southern lake, never freed from its saltness, and 
so deeply pitched in the bowels of the earth that its intense 
evaporation balances the inflow and keeps it of a constant 
size. Nowhere else is the earth gashed to such depth as 
here. And thescene thus created is a perpetual astonishment. 

While north of the Dead Sea the Jordan valley revels in 
a tropical luxuriance of vegetation, about that Sea itself, 
save at one or two oases, there is stark lifelessness. Its 
brilliant blue waters are thick as oil and bitter with intense 
brine; its shores are whitened and glistening ; above its 
surface hangs the perpetual haze of its evaporation, like 
steam from a devil’s cauldron. It is brilliant with light 
and colour, and it is deadly still. In addition to the salt 
marshes at its lower end there exist about its coast various 
springs of petroleum, and the earth is full of bituminous 
and sulphurous deposits. Lumps of bitumen are often 
found floating on the sea itself. 

This waste and bitter hollow, with its inflammable 
earth, has in all likelihood been the scene of some such 
devastations as our Book of Genesis records. “The lower 
reaches of the Dead Sea, beyond the promontory which 
almost cuts it in two, are in such striking contrast to the 
upper reaches—the former being only a few feet deep, 
while the latter plunge to the huge depth of thirteen hundred 
feet—as to suggest that they are a comparatively recent 
extension of the sea, brought about, perhaps, by some eruptive 


AN INTERCESSION FOR SODOM 57 


change of level. Here in ancient times may have been 
the plain. on which were situate the doomed cities. But 
there has for long been vigorous debate as to whether these 
cities lay north or south of the Dead Sea, and no certain 
solution of the problem is possible. To my own inexpert 
judgment it looks as though the weight of evidence were 
decidedly in favour of the southern site, where the hill 
Usdum seems to preserve the name Sodom; where the 
traditional site of Zoar is fixed by a village still bearing 
a similar name; and where the pillar of rock-salt, popu- 
larly called Lot’s Wife, is standing, or was standing in 
recent times. We cannot be certain about it. But such 
a conclusion is attractive to one’s imagination : the sinister 
appearance of that southern coast of the Dead Sea har- 
monizes with the grim old tale of conflagration and doom. 
It is not difficult to conceive some earth explosion in that 
fantastic abyss—which was created by and subject to such 
turbulence—setting into a blaze the inflammable bitumen 
and sulphur; flinging it up sky-high, maybe, so that it 
rained down upon the helpless cities, and burnt them off 
the earth; much as Herculaneum and Pompeii were 
destroyed by the eruptions of Vesuvius. We can but 
_ guess at what actually took place. But it is scarcely doubtful 
that some lurid and appalling destruction of cities in the 
Dead Sea area actually happened ; so sharply striking the 
Imagination of the ancient world that the story of it was 
handed down with lingering terror as one of the outstanding 
dramas of history, and preached about as one of the most 
exemplary instances of divine judgment. 

And this very awful event took place, we are told, in 
the lifetime of Abraham. 

Now with the advent of Abraham into the Genesis 
narrative it is obvious that we pass out of the region of 
the traditional myths which Israel, from remote antiquity, 
shared in common with her Semitic neighbours, and enter 
upon records with some substantial basis of remembered 


58 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


history—records coloured, no doubt, by legendary imagina- 
tion, and even incorporating a mythic element here and 
there, yet records of actual and notable men who stand out 
conspicuous on the horizons of national memory. ‘There 
may be some justice in the claim that these patriarchal 
figures stand to represent tribes. Perhaps so. Perhaps 
some of their recorded deeds are but picturesque expressions 
of the inter-relationship of various clans. But common 
sense will hardly allow the individuality of the patriarchs 
to be explained away by over-pressing such ingenious sug- 
gestions, Simple-minded people remember and relate not 
complex social movements but dramatic individual deeds. 
Early history consists in the biography of picked men. 
They may be tribal types, and some tribal history may be 
expressed in their stories. But the tribe would have no 
story if it had no hero. An Abraham or a Jacob, an Esau 
or a Lot, may signify a tribe, but he signifies first of all an 
individual hero, whose name was handed down the genera- 
tions in many a camp-fire yarn. Such men become idealized 
as they sink into the distant past. The records of their 
acts may be trimmed into such shape as best serves the 
symbolic expression of later religious ideas or historical 
surmises : for we all tend to shape the past as we should 
like it to have been; we tidy it up, eliminating what seems 
to have no significance for our own ideals, and cutting 
a sharp outline round the men and the events we want to 
remember, so that they stand out for ever as types for our 
admiration, encouragement or warning. Allowance must 
be made for this fictional or legendary quality in history. 
Mere chronicle is a dust-bin from which our dramatic instinct 
sifts and selects what it values for practical guidance or for 
imaginative pleasure. It embellishes these things with a 
measure of decorative romance. But they are grounded in 
sober chronicle. They are neither mere creations of 
fancy nor mere types of dimly surmised social movements, 
but blurred and distant visions of great men whose personal 


AN INTERCESSION FOR SODOM 59 


prowess impressed itself indelibly on the memories of their 
_ descendants. 

And the personality which stands at the source of Israel’s 
distinctive history is that of Abraham, the great nomad 
sheikh, who broke out of Chaldea and, after long wanderings, 
settled with his growing clan on the uplands of Palestine. — 
It was a no-man’s land. . Other tribes had their villages here 
and there; but the moors and wildernesses were open 
pasturage for any wandering folk who came thither. “The 
regular rotation of a tribe about the same area would give 
in time a sort of proprietary right there, as it does in Arabia 
to-day. And from time to time, as the clans with their 
great herds became unwieldy, certain families within them 
would swarm off and find new pastures sufficiently remote 
from the old to avoid provocative competition. “Thus 
Abraham’s clan, which had settled first of all in the district 
about Bethel, came at length to a crisis which necessitated its 
splitting in two and moving away from the arid hills of 
Benjamin to new shepherding grounds, 

Abraham and Lot, standing on some summit near Bethel, 
survey the prospect; and Abraham magnanimously offers 
the first choice of direction to his younger kinsman. East- 
ward of them lay the great cutting of the Jordan valley, 
and the eyes of Lot were caught by its tropical luxuriance, 
“like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt.” He 
made his choice to settle there, and, going down off the 
hills, “‘ he pitched his tent toward Sodom ”’ ; while Abraham 
went southward along the hill-ridges to the fertile valley 
of Hebron embosomed in the uplands of Judah. 

_ Here there came to him, as he sat at his tent door in the 
heat of the day, three strangers. The old tale of their 
visit is as mysterious as it is charming. Apparently more 
than one hand has been at work upon the narrative, and, 
to one editor anyhow, the three strangers are no earthly 

beings but the Lord himself with attendant angels, The 
_ human visitors are transfigured into a theophany. God 


60 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


walks the earth in human form, and lunches in Abraham’s 
tent under the oaks of Mamre on beef and butter and milk. 
Such an idea of theophany can only have arisen out of an 
intense impression that the visit of the three strangers had a 
providential significance: that in and through them God 
communicated His will to Abraham. He who made the 
winds His angels and the lightning His messenger could 
much more use human instruments for His revelations. 
It seems probable, therefore, that an original story of three 
human visitors, whose visit stood out in memory as a remark- 
able portent, came to be interpreted as a visit of angels— 
nay, of the Lord Himself. By a daring and picturesque 
anthropomorphism the old writer is expressing the con- 
viction that God speaks to man through man, that our 
fellow-creatures may verily reveal God to us. We entertain 
angels, we entertain God Himself, unawares, when we 
entertain men who contrive to bring home to us some fresh 
message concerning the divine will. 

Whence these men came we have not the faintest trace, 
except that they know the conditions of life in Sodom, 
and have, too, a shrewd estimate of the worth and growing 
power of Abraham. From the story, as tradition developed 
it, we gather that their converse under the oaks revolved 
around two themes—the birth of a son to Abraham’s chief 
wife, and the great and mighty nation that should thus spring 
from his loins ; and the wickedness and coming doom of 
those cities of the plain near which Lot had made his settle- 
ment. ‘The possibility of Sarah’s child-bearing and the 
wickedness, even the danger, of Sodom, may well have been 
the substance of their talk, though the historian has no 
doubt reported, or rather composed, their conversation in 
the light of after events. He makes them, or God speaking 
by them, predict the happy issue in the one case and the 
terrible doom in the other. But is it straining reality too 
much to suppose that these strangers did impress upon Abra- 
ham some predictions in these matters which were after- 


AN INTERCESSION FOR SODOM 61 


wards shown to have been quite miraculous in foresight ? 
Why else should their visit have stood out in memory as a 
veritable visitation of God? We may be sure that their 
shrewd surmises, their discussion of probable events, were 
not couched in the terms of precise prediction the story 
gives to. us; but that something in the recollected con- 
versation of these strangers just before the destruction of 
Sodom gave suggestion and basis for the story as tradition 
developed it we may surely regard as likely enough. 
The morals of Sodom were apparently notorious, and 
the gaunt, austere herdsmen of the hills must often have 
discussed together the life of those luxurious and lascivious 
cities lying in the valley pit far beneath them, Abraham 
had a special concern in the matter now that his kinsmen 
had moved down into that enervating tropical air, where 
their hardihood and wholesomeness would so easily be 
undermined. And if the magnanimity which characterizes 
this great patriarch in all the stories told of him be indeed 
true to fact, we may be sure that Abraham had many 
prayerful thoughts for the safety of Lot and his family. 
The magnificent narrative of Abraham’s intercession is 
in all probability a late insertion into the narrative; but it 
is inserted because it was felt to be appropriate to Abraham’s 
traditional character. Such a man, it was thought, must 
have felt the pity and the moral concern for justice which 
the reflection of a later age certainly felt in face of such 
terrific physical disaster. Could the Judge of all the earth 
commit a wrong? Could He indiscriminately slay the 
innocent with the wicked? Ugly accidents brought home 
this problem to Jewish thinkers. It could not be that 
God was unjust. And so they argued that it must have 
been only the wicked that were slain; that God would 
have saved even Sodom if only a handful of righteous folk 
had dwelt in it. They did not seem to remember the 
number of innocent children who must have been there, 
as the much later and kindlier morality of the Book of 


62 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


Jonah remembers them in Nineveh. They were still 
in the region of thought when a man’s whole family was 
unquestioningly punished with him for his sin. Neither 
had they reached to the insight of the Book of Job which 
knew that misfortune is not to be always accounted an 
accurate reflex of wrong-doing. ‘To earlier thought outward 
disaster was solely due to inward baseness. Yet the des- 
truction of whole cities together hardly suited such a theory. 
The author of this story of intercession is concerned to 
show that Sodom was so saturated with wickedness that, 
against all probability, not ten decent men were discoverable 
therein. And hence it was not God’s indiscriminate 
wrath, no lack of justice on His part toward an innocent 
minority, but strictly a fitting of the punishment to the 
crime, which brought about the destruction of Sodom. 
God would have had mercy, the thought is, if that innocent 
minority had existed ; but to the writer’s mind it cannot 
have existed, or God would be found acting unrighteously. 

But we cannot miss the tender compassion of the plead- 
Ings put into the mouth of Abraham. ‘The old writer’s 
good nature and tender-heartedness are struggling with an 
inadequate theory of the retributions of Providence. He 
is eager to plead even fora Sodom. He believes his great- 
hearted hero Abraham must have so pleaded, when he was 
made aware of Sodom’s overhanging doom. ‘There is a 
real evangelical compassion in this narrative which stands 
alone in the earlier Bible writings and reminds one of 
the voice of Hosea. It may perhaps date from the great 
prophetic period, but its appearance in this ancient patriarchal 
context makes it peculiarly moving. 

Possibly we may find a trace of Abraham’s active concern 
for Sodom, or at least for Lot’s family there, in the latter 
part of the story, which tells how two of the strangers, 
having left Mamre, make for the Dead Sea valley, and 
visit Lot, and are instrumental in helping his escape from 
the threatening catastrophe. This may be a record of 


AN INTERCESSION FOR SODOM 63 


actual urgent pressure brought to bear on Lot by Abraham 
that he should tear himself away from a neighbourhood 
so notoriously wicked—a piece of advice acted upon in 
time to prevent Lot’s tribe being destroyed when the great 
catastrophe soon afterwards occurred. ‘There must be 
some ground underlying the persistent tradition of Lot 
having dwelt in Sodom and yet having escaped into the 
hills before the conflagration. On the basis of such fact 
there sprang up the folk-tale about the pillar of salt ; just 
as, in a thousand other spots, quaintly shaped rocks have 
given rise to humorous or terrifying legends often associated 
with some famous old local personage. Lot was the man 
who escaped from Sodom: but this queer rock on the 
line of his escape, like an old woman looking back over 
her shoulder—why, this must be Lot’s wife turned into 
stone as a punishment for her curiosity. Let all inquisitive 
women take heed, and be prompt to obey their husbands ! 
And so the old contorted lump of rock-salt stood for ages, 
with its nickname of Lot’s Wife, to witness to the story 
of this flaring disaster grown dim with the passage of the 
years, and to the tradition of a righteous Remnant that 
escaped, 

At a far later date in Jewish history the doctrine of a 
salvable Remnant of the people took a central place in 
prophecy. The nation as a whole was despaired of, but 
there was a minority that might and should be saved. It 
was not strong enough to leaven the whole lump with 
righteousness, but it could separate itself from the evil 
mass, and make itself a holy seed for the future. In such 
a movement of thought we see, as it were, the Puritan 
view of Churchmanship as against the Catholic. It 
despairs of the general salvation, and so far is weak in faith 
and hard in judgment; but this very despair is born out 
of the intensity of its moral idealism, its sense of the necessity 
of aloofness from the world, its passionate pursuit of an 
arduous spiritual adventure. ‘To minds or to moods of 


‘ 


64 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


this Puritan quality salvation always appears as a breathless 
escape from a doomed world, a solitary pilgrim’s progress 
out of a city ripe for burning ; and the constant motto of 
such minds is, ‘‘ Remember Lot’s wife.” ‘To turn wistful 
or curious backward looks upon that.renounced realm of 
wickedness is to compromise and falter in one’s effort. 
It is to be paralysed and petrified. It is to lose salvation, 
and stand for ever in the suburbs of Sodom as a spectacle 
of indecision, a monument of the doom of irresoluteness. 
Such puritanic doctrine is tonic and stimulating. It braces 
the will to resolution and prompts to real inward strife 
that we may make our calling and election sure. But 
the Puritan and the Catholic standpoint each needs the other. 
In the search after individual escape from doom we may 
easily forget the evangel of that divine good-will that would 
fain reverse the doom and save the whole body. Lot was 
right in seeking to escape contamination and to save his 
soul alive. He was the Puritan in us all—the necessary 
Puritan. But we miss in him the note of Abraham’s 
intercession—the note of the catholic evangel which is 
not so bent on getting saved as on saving, which gets itself 
saved by serving in pity a poor, blundering, vicious world 
that needs a deal of praying for. 

‘The prayer of Abraham links itself up with that vision 
of Ezekiel centuries later, where the prophet rises above 
the desperate hope of a mere remnant that is salvable, and 
dreams of the new spiritual temple in Israel, from beneath 
the altar of which a divine spring bubbles up and flows 
away down the Kidron gorge, swelling and swelling into 
a great river. ‘Through that torn gorge in the Judzan 
hills it turns eastward, gushing and leaping down toward 
Jericho, till it enters the Jordan valley and pours itself 
into the Dead Sea. And lo! that bitter sea is quickened 
into freshness ; its borders once again bloom with gardens ; 
its surface is covered with fishing craft; the whole of 
that awful pit of desolation where Sodom had been doomed 


AN INTERCESSION FOR SODOM 65 


is athrill with life again; the fishermen crowd its coasts 
from Engedi to Eneglaim, and trees yield their life-giving 
fruit from month to month. And so, in Ezekiel’s dear 
dream, a vital religion shall redeem even the blasted site of 
old Sodom. No region of life is so waste and blighted 
but that the waters of a true faith shall not convert it into 
a garden of the Lord. Even Sodom is reclaimable. Even 
the Dead Sea shall be resurrected into life. The vision 
of those scorched and smoking ruins under the flaming hail 
of brimstone with which the Genesis story fills our minds— 
like some infernal Dantesque circle, leaving that terrific 
pit of the Ghér to fascinate us horribly like the mouth of 
hell itself—is thus counteracted by the exultant religious 
hope and the unforgettable poetry of Ezekiel, who looks 
down into that great chasm of the Jordan and sees it again, 
as Lot first saw it, ‘“‘like the garden of the Lord, like the 
land of Egypt.” And the Old Testament thus finally 
leaves this strange and awful site of the cities of the plain 
not under the light of judgment but of redemption, not 
doomed by sin but healed by grace. 


Even with so soft a surge and an increasing, 
Drunk of the sand and thwarted of the clod, 
Stilled and astir and checked and never-ceasing 
Spreadeth the great wave of the grace of God ; 


Bears to the marishes and bitter places 

Healing for hurt and for their poisons balm, 
Isle after isle in infinite embraces 

Floods and enfolds and fringes with the palm. 


This ancient intercession for Sodom is like a first faint 
whisper of the larger Christian hope. Sin must for ever 
bring doom, and the hell it creates for itself is an obvious 
reality. But the human heart pleads against an utter 
and irreversible destruction. In the wickedest quarters 
are there not some elements of good which may bring 
deliverance in the hour of judgment? We must needs 
hope so. And hence in our creed we postulate the descent 


5 


66 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


of Christ into hell. It may be argued that this phrase 
implied no more than an approach to the ancients in Sheol, 
who had died before Christ’s advent on earth, so that His 
evangel was effectively offered to all men of all ages. But 
the general Christian heart will read more into it than that. 
It will be taken as symbol of the truth that the gospel of 
forgiveness is never closed; that everywhere in God’s 
universe, in whatever hells the spirits of men may be dwell- 
ing, there is still an offer of salvation and a place for repent- 
ance and recovery. For we believe in the forgiveness of 
sins, the utter forthgiving and deliverance of mankind from 
all evil, as the goal of God’s purpose. And we believe 
there is an eternal intercession of the Christ on behalf of 
all men which, though it cannot prevent the doom of sin, 
can and will at last exorcise the sin and so reverse the doom 
and change our hell to heaven. 

The grace of God—struggling for expression in Abraham’s 
intercession, finding a surer vehicle in Ezekiel’s dream of 
the redeemed land, and winning final utterance through 
Jesus Christ, our great High Priest, who is the same yester- 
day, to-day and for ever—shall yet bring our Sodoms and 
Gomorrahs into penitence and healing, and it shall be 
tolerable for them at the Last Day. 


‘THE SACRIFICE OF 
THE BELOVED SON” 





And they came to the place which God had told him of ; and Abraham 
built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his 
son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched 
forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of 
the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Lay not thy hand 
upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him: for now I know 
that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine 
only son from Me. 

GENESIS XXll. 9-12. 


Vv 
THE SACRIFICE OF THE BELOVED SON 
| UTSIDE the ancient city of Carthage there lay 


a patch of thorny scrub or jungle held in superstitious 
dread as a spot inhabited by dragons. And within this 


desolation there stood a terrifying sanctuary where human ° 
sacrifices were made. A great idol figure with outstretched | 


arms was here erected on the edge of a pit in which a furnace 
was prepared. “Then a naked child would be laid across the 
arms of the idol, and thence rolled off into the fire that 
flared below. So the child was delivered to the god, who 
committed it to the flames. ‘This horrid spectacle from 
old Carthage is, perhaps, the most gruesome example 
recorded of the persistent practice of child-sacrifice among 
the ancients. But it existed almost anywhere; and in 
particular it was rife throughout the Semitic world. The 
Book of Kings records, for instance, how Mesha, the king 
of Moab, who had revolted from his servitude to Israel 
and was being hard pressed by the siege of his capital city, 
as a last resort took his eldest son and offered him in sacrifice 
on the city wall to his god Chemosh. We know, too, how 
the Israelites themselves fell into this practice again and 
again, notably in the evil reign of Manasseh, burning their 


children in ‘Topheth—the fire-place—in the valley of | 


et 
< 


Hinnom : a memory the horror of which sunk so deeply | 


into Hebrew imagination that this valley of Hinnom or 


Gehenna became to later ages the usual symbol of hell. 


The horrible wickedness of Manasseh provoked reaction, , 


and there followed in the reign of his successor, Josiah, 
| ; a 


p 
| i} } A 


70 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


one of the most sweeping revolutions in religious and social 
law which Israel’s changeful history can show. It was 


the period of the publication of Deuteronomy and the 


_preaching of Jeremiah. And the literature of this period 
‘denounces the practice of child-sacrifice: ‘‘ They built 
up the high places of Baal in the valley of Hinnom,” says 
Jeremiah, “ to cause their sons and daughters to pass through 
the fire unto Molech; which I commanded them not, 
neither came it into My mind, that they should do this 
jabomination.” And so we find that, among his other 
jreforms, Josiah “defiled Topheth that no man might 
j make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to 
~ Molech.” 

In the still later reforms of Ezra’s period, when the 
/ Priestly Code was formulated, it was still considered neces- 


\ sary to lay down stringent laws against the sacrifice of 


we 


\children. In Leviticus xx. the death penalty is assigned 
to anyone found perpetrating this horrid crime; and it 
is attacked with such emphasis that one can hardly doubt 
that even at that late period there was real danger of the 
recrudescence of this primitive custom. 

But centuries before this, in the splendid dawn of literary 
prophecy in the eighth century, we find Micah _ raising 


I give my first-born for my trarisgression, the fruit of my 
body for the sin of my soul?” Micah is denouncing 
animal-sacrifice in general, and child-sacrifice as the summit 


of frantic folly. The sacrifice which God requires is 
| Justice and mercy and devoutness. Animal-sacrifice was, 
‘)) Of course, incessant at that day, and Micah would hardly , 


have weakened the force of his plea by dragging in an attack | 


_on child-sacrifice if that, too, had not recurrently occurred | 
as a part of religious ritual. 


It is evident, then, that this practice was an ever-present 
danger in Israel right up to the post-exilic period, despite 


SR ey ae 


THE SACRIFICE OF THE BELOVED SON 71 


the denunciations of Micah in the eighth century and_of 
Jeremiah in the seventh ; and we know, as a matter of 


fact, that its most_ ais and feliperere outbreak was. 
in ie time of Jeremiah’s own childhood under Manasseh. | - 
In view of this, all the more astonishing becomes the — 


unforgettable story of Abraham and Isaac. This story 
belongs to the earliest document in the Pentateuch, and 
must have been written pretty well a century before Micah’s 
time. Even if the story were made up at the time of writing 
it is significant as the earliest protest against child-sacrifice. 
But it purports to be a true story from the life of Abraham ; 
and, though doubtless coloured and shaped by its passage 
as the ages, there is no reason to suppose that it may not 
rest upon an actual experience in the life of the patriarch, 
just as much as any other traditional story about him. This 
early author was not a fiction-writer, making up stories 
out of his own head. He was but gathering together the 
popular tales of his people—old tales that had been in circu- 
lation from the far past—and weaving them into a con- 
secutive history. 

This tale, then, is a very ancient one. And it shows 
Abraham as, deeds one of the great moral innovators of 
our race. Pihiehardy old desert tribesman, redoubtable for 
his warriorship, admirable for his stately Arab courtesy, 
and strangely distinguished as a man of deep meditation, a 
dreamer of dreams, had veritable revelations from God. 
In him the ethical consciousness of mankind took definite 
upward steps. No one can miss the brooding piety of the 
man, or his passionate sincerity. He is of the stuff that 


shapes into sainthood. Out of Chaldea he emerges under | 


a sense of divine calling—some inner pressure bidding 
him leave that old idolatrous civilization that he might 
carve out a destiny for himself beyond the wilderness, and 
build a new people austere, simple, devout, to do a work 
for God on earth that he could scarce guess at. And now 
he has found his home on these upland pastures of Palestine, 


i > a ¢ 
” 


72. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


and his only son is growing up to manhood, the incarnation 
of all that dim magnificent promise for the future which he 
cherished in his heart as God’s own pledge—the happy 
* burden of his life-long dreams and prayers. But was he not 
_ too happy and prosperous? God was blessing him super- 
_ abundantly. It was surely too good to last. Dire things 
| take place in this world. What if God were to test his faith 
| by suddenly cutting off this darling son? Could his fidelity 
stand the shock? Would he still trust God’s promise of 
the glorious race that was to issue from his loins? He 
wondered. Why, there were people who even sacrificed 
their children voluntarily to God ! Dare he ever make 
so overwhelming a sacrifice? He—so peculiarly _ called 
by God and so favoured by providence—would he fail to 
rise to the level of these men in costly offering? Perhaps 
these very thoughts and doubts in his raiders they 
not themselves be a divine prompting to a duty he had so 
far been blind to? Might not the very promise embodied 
in Isaac be but an extra test of his willingness to give up 
all to God? God was his suzerain, to whom he owed 
everything. He must hold back nothing whatsoever. 
Abraham felt himself faced with the same call”to sacrifice 
that our young countryman, Rupert Brooke, felt and so 
tellingly recorded ; 

These laid the world away ; poured out the red 

Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be, 

Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, 


That men call age; and those who would have been, 
Their sons they gave, their immortality. 


So Abraham, brooding over his duty to God, felt an im- 
perious call to give up even his son—not, by fe own death, 
to renounce some prospective child of the future, but to offts 
this actual dear lad who embodied all his hopes—the i instru- 
ment of his own earthly immortality i in the great race that 
should develop from him. It was the most severe struggle 
that any man’s faith could be put to. Yet Abraham nerved 


THE SACRIFICE OF THE BELOVED SON 72 


himself to the task. ‘Taking Isaac with him, he journeys 
from home to some hill-sanctuary, builds up an altar there, 
and ties the boy upon it. In an agony of wild resolution 
he raises the knife to stab the terrified child. But his | 
hand is held. At the last instant his conscience hears a new | 


word, It cannot be that God demands this horrid act. fi Ya. 


To be willing to yield up ‘his son to God—yes, that- indeed,‘ 
was necessary. But by this act of deliberate murder ? 
No, a thousand times no! Such a notion turned God 
into a devil. It could not be true. It was.a fog of super- 
stition that had overspread his devoutness. God knew he 
was willing to dedicate his son to any hard sacrifice that_ | 
life really demanded. But his God was a God of life and | 
hope and promise, not to be propitiated by a wanton murder 
of precious childhood. His second thoughts were God’s 
real angel. ‘And so in a sudden happy glow of enlighten- 
ment ce tears loose the bonds and lifts the boy off the altar— 
all the God-given fatherhood in him rising in exultant 
victory over the dreadful superstition that had almost twisted 
his devoutness into crime. 

Abraham was challenging the whole outlook and practice 
of his times. But he did not doubt his revelation. It 
was the Lord’s angel who had held his hand, the Lord’s 
message that rang in his ears, Standing bald that altar 
on the lonely hill in Palestine he had won a decisive spiritual 
victory for mankind, and lifted our race out of one dark 
fog of superstition, Henceforth Abraham’s people should 
know a truer law of sacrifice. And the best among them 
did so. Despite the falling back of the stupid popu- 
lace again and again into heathen rites of child-murder, 
there was nevertheless a succession of great voices in Israel 
who took up the lesson of this dramatic story and repeated 
it from age to age, until the old heathen barbarism was| 
finally beaten off the field before the advance of a purer, 
_ gentler faith. 

This old tale of Abraham’s sacrifice is, therefore, one 


74. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


of the great landmarks in the religious history of mankind. 
It marks for ever the condemnation of child-murder as if 
that were a thing desirable to the heart of God. But if 
‘we consider it discriminatingly we see that it marks not 
the abandonment but the transmutation of child-sacrifice. 
The sacrifice of all that 1s most precious—that 1 is, its dedica~ 
tion, the yielding of it to the service of God—is a permanent 
demand of religion. And the most exacting of all sacrifices 
is still that of the child. It is far easier for a true man to 
yield himself to risk of danger and death than it is for him 
to stand aside perforce and let his children run such risk. 
We heard much in the Great War of parents giving up 
their sons for England and civilization. We heard too much 
of it at times. “There was a touch of cheapness and insin- 
cerity in the reflected pride of parents who saw their boys 
in khaki, while they themselves, perhaps, were doing well 
out of the war at home. And yet there was sacrifice— 
» the greatest of all possible sacrifice—for many a parent 
“who was prevented from joining in the fight himself and 
had to stand by and see the son, who was all his family 
hope, go out to face the guns. Where love was vehement, 
it was, in all soberness, a sharper sacrifice to give one’s 
son than to give oneself, however much the cynic may dis- 
pute it. David’s agonized cry rings true, and is echoed in 
every generous parent’s heart: “‘O my son Absalom, my 
son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, 
O Bpsaiom my son, my son!” (It is axiomatic that a 
man’s farthermost reach of sacrifice is not to yield his own 
life but his child’s—that life which is the better part_ -_ of 
himself, with all the promise of the future in it, and which, 
once gone, leaves only the older withering part of himecie 
to eat out its forlorn remnant of life on 1 earth, a limbless, 
sterile, disenchanted thing. 7 

Many readers will remember the story of Cassy in Unele 
Toms Cabin. She had been dragged through every possible 
defilement of slavery, but so long as her cuir were 








THE SACRIFICE OF THE BELOVED SON 75. 
preserved to her she kept some measure of hope. At 
length the final blow came. ‘They were sold. And passing 
a calaboose one day she suddenly heard a child’s voice, and — 
her little boy ran screaming to her and caught desperately 
on to her dress. Rough men snatched the boy back, and 
carried him away swearing that they would give him a lesson 
he would never forget. Poor Cassy turned and ran, with 
the screams of the beaten child ringing in her ears. Some- 
thing seemed to snap in her head, and she fell into delirium. 
Far, far harder to bear than all her own pain and ignominy 
was the agony of her boy, whom she was powerless to save. 
Yes, the parent heart is hit harder through its children 
than through its. own flesh>-~The supreme sacrifice is the 
sacrifice of the child. 

Hence, when we come to the New Testament, and 
men are seeking for some human symbol whereby to inter- 
pret the passionate love of God, of which Christ had aroused 
the conviction in them, it is to this idea of child-sacrifice 
that they turn, and declare that in the life and death of 
Jesus what we really see is God Himself acting on the plane 
of man’s own most exacting and heart-rending devotion— 
{God yielding up His only-begotten Son to redeem the world. 
It isa figure of speech, of course. But it is the only adequate | 
‘figure of speech to express the Christian conviction of 
what God’s love was doing in and through Jesus_ Christ. 
Jesus had brought home to men a new revelation of God. 
/He had made them realize God not as an austere sovereign 
| but as a father and passionate lover, toiling and agonizing 

\.to lift men out of their sins into blessedness. They saw 
the death of Jesus as a domestic tragedy for the heart of 
God—not as something God wanted and coldly, calcu- 
latingly arranged or allowed ; but as God’s own last effort 
of costly sacrifice to win a stubborn world. Jesus himself 
had pictured God as the owner of the vineyard, who, when 
all His other messengers had been rejected and abused, at 
last sent His only son: “‘ They will reverence my son,” He 


76 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


said—‘‘ surely they will reverence my son.” So God had 
unavailingly sent His servants the prophets; and at last 
was forced to the supreme sacrifice—giving up all, giving 
up more than life itself, or what a man values far more 
than life itself, his offspring: ‘‘ God so loved the world 
that He sent His only begotten Son that they who believe 
in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” It is 
_a very sublime figure. And to men who know the cost 
of giving up their children to awful risks for the world’s 
sake, nothing else could so well bring home the sublime 
passion of God’s redeeming love for His creatures. 

F. D. Maurice, in a passage of very deep and just reflection 
in his Kingdom of Christ, has pointed out that the essential 
idea underlying the old stories of God’s covenant with 
Abraham was that it was a covenant with a family. “The 
tribes among which Abraham was dwelling were sensual, 
and-their-rites of worship were sensual, and in this sensuality 
was involved a neglect of family pends To give witness 
against this sensuality, for the truth of an invisible and 
righteous God, was therefore to give witness at the same 
time to the sacredness of family bonds. “The notion 
of a Being exercising power over men, seen in the clouds, 
and heard in the winds, this was that which the wor/d enter- 
tained, and trembled, till utter corruption brought in utter 
atheism, ‘That there is a God related to men and made 
known to men through their human relations, this was the 
faith of Abraham, the beginner of the Church on earth.” 
The passage is condensed and subtle. But Maurice is 
contrasting the notion of God as the mere force behind 
nature and natural instinct with the idea of God.as the 
Power who originates moral relationships, the Power whom 
we see reflected in “ happy household love”? among men. 
The true God is first revealed in the principle of family 
affection and loyalty, which is the root from which all 
human justice and fellowship develops. But if God is a 
God of moral relationships and_not_ merely ~of—physical 


THE SACRIFICE OF THE BELOVED SON 47 


force, if He reveals Himself through the family, as He 
did to Abraham,then He is really akin tous: He is no 
blind force, nor self-centred despot, but a God with a heart, 
recognizing moral ties with His people. There lies the 
root out of which Christianity springs. There, as Maurice ° 
Says, is the beginning of the Church. For it is this con- 
viction of God’s moral relationship to us which unfolds 
at last into the Christian evangel of God’s sacrificial love 
for us—that blazing truth which has astonished and fas- 
cinated Christian hearts from St. Paul’s day to our own. 

God is our parent and our comrade. In all our affliction 
He is afflicted. He Is “martyred in our martyrdoms, ‘In 
the sacrifice of the just for the unjust it is He ‘Himself 
we see making atonement. His love uses its last weapon, 

He gives what costs a parent dearer than his own life—He 
gives the life of His child. We have no metaphor to go 
beyond that in describing the passion of God’s heart. God 
is Abraham over again, but not giving His Son to death 
wilfully. Some theories of atonement would make out 
God to be as superstitious as Abraham before his enlighten- 
ment. But it is not at His desire that Christ dies. Like 
the owner of the vineyard He hoped against hope that men 
would reverence His Son. Only when they rejected Him 
did God submit, as it were, to the only way, the last chance 
of love’s victory, and yield Christ to the Cross. God is 
not pleased with slaughter. It is not His will that the 
least of His little ones should perish. It is man in his 
reckless folly who imposes slaughter upon God, who drives 
God to yield His beloved Son~to~death, that at long last 
man may grow aghast at the havoc of his sin, and turn again 
and be forgiven. 

God is related to us. His character is reflected in our 
own highest emotions and resolutions. And if there be 
men, as there are men, willing to yield to the uttermost 
_ sacrifice for the world’s sake, willing to give up more than 
life itself—the fruit of their bodie eS, the incarnation of their 


PR a acini 





meres, spe meemnerctror 


“8. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


hopes—then we do_but.see_in them a reflection of the true 
fact of God: that He is utterly given to the redemption 
of His world, ready to agonize in sacrifice for it. He gives 
His only Sor And mice we watch Christ dying on the 
Cross, we look beyond Him to the heart of the Eternal 
Father, who suffers in that act an even deeper agony, even 
as a parent who should be condemned to witness his own 
son’s martyrdom. 

But why does the Almighty allow Himself to be put 
to so extreme a sacrifice for the world’s sake? Why does 
He not forcibly prevent man’s ghastly sin? Is not His 
sacrifice a sign of Hisimpotence ? Why, if He be almighty, 
does he tolerate all the agelong martyrdom of the good 
at the hands of evil, which we Christians declare to be a 
martyrdom of His own heart? Is not a bafled weakling 
on the throne of the universe, or else is not “‘ the President 
of the Immortals”’ sporting with us all? So, in the haste 
of our passionate pity, we query. But God is not almighty 
tyranny: He is all-sovran love. He cannot deny His 
own nature, nor subvert His own purpose. oe way 
of conquest is the slow way of patient endurance, ut_it 
is the only way that succeeds in changing the heart of evil 
toward good. In our rash challenge to God to put His 
foot down with imperial dominance and. stop the cruel 
crimes of men, we are asking Him to step on to a lower 
plane and to adopt an ineffective réle. He is interfering 
in the only way that saves—the martyr’s way. He con- 
quers by forbearance. He does not dragoon His world : 
He dies for it, dies again and again in the death of His chosen 
children, i in the Well-beloved. The meekness of the 
Almighty, who cannot be overcome because He is infinitely 
strong to bear and to endure—what a thought is there to 
humble our hot-headedness | As if He were not infinitely 
more shocked and agonized by sin than we! Yet we are 
tempted to think that our short-sighted remedies lie deeper 
than His, and to sneer at His somnolence or His powerlessness, 


THE SACRIFICE OF THE BELOVED SON 79 


But no! He is Christ. His method is Christ’s method. 
He wins by suffering. He rises to victory by the Cross. 
He is the love that endureth ail things and abideth. And 
there is no other power in heaven or earth to overcome 
evil but His sacrificial love. 

O Father Eternal, whose love we have spurned, whose 
power we have doubted, teach us yet the gospel of “Thy 
sacrifice! Help us to understand that it is Thy heart 
we have broken in gibbeting the innocent ; that Thou hast 
been the victim of all our human crimes; and that still 
in patient endurance Thou art bearing all we lay upon 
Thee, seeking ‘Thy sweet revenge only in the changed heart 
which has wearied of its vileness and turns at last to bathe 
Thy feet in tears ! 

And to that prayer we add but this: As the ancient 
world sacrificed in dread of Thee, let us sacrifice in love of 
Thee ; may the knowledge of Thy gospel of love fortify 
us to share with Thee, in our poor way, the pain of the 
world’s reclamation ; to be willing to give up all, as Thou 
wilt and when hou wilt, following Thy path of sacrifice 
and holding back no dearest thing from Thy service, however 
bitter the cost, however dimly seen the gain; until Thy 
blessed purpose be accomplished and a ransomed world rests 
marvelling in Thy peace. 


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Vi 


THE DREAM OF THE 
HEAVENLY LADDER 


And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the 
top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending 
and descending on it. 

GENESIS XXVill. 12. 


VI 


THE DREAM OF THE HEAVENLY LADDER 


SOME years ago, while spending a holiday among the 

English Lakes, I was allowed one day to enter the 
grounds of Wordsworth’s old home at Rydal Mount. In 
the midst of the garden, which slopes pretty steeply in 
front of the house, Wordsworth had built up a little hillock. 
From the garden level one has no very extensive view 3 but 
as soon as you climb this little mound a magnificent pano- 
rama lies in front of you. Over the trees in the foreground 
you look down a great stretch of Windermere, three or 
four miles long; and away to the south-west, capping the 
other hills, rises the great head of Bowfell. It is a very 
glorious prospect indeed. 

One summer evening a century ago Wordsworth stood 
here watching a sunset of extraordinary splendour and 
beauty, and was inspired by it to write the last of his really 
great poems. For years afterwards he went on writing, 
but never again with any sustained magic in his pen. When 
the sun set so gloriously that evening, Wordsworth’s poetry 
also gave out its last blaze of splendour and sank away into 
grey dusk. 

Now he calls our attention, in a note to this poem, to a 
peculiar phenomenon sometimes observed in a mountainous 
district, when the air is very humid or filled with a sunny 
haze—an apparent multiplication of the mountain ridges 
one above the other, shadowy, ethereal, like a sort of Jacob’s 


ladder leading up to heaven. It was so on the evening 
83 


84 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


in question; and these are the exquisite lines in which 
Wordsworth describes the scene : 


No sound is uttered,—but a deep 

And solemn harmony pervades 

The hollow vale from steep to steep, 

And penetrates the glades. 

Far distant images draw nigh, 

Called forth by wondrous potency 

Of beamy radiance, that imbues, 

Whate’er it strikes, with gem-like hues! 

In vision exquisitely clear, 

Herds range along the mountain-side ; 

And glistening antlers are descried ; 

And gilded flocks appear. 

Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve ! 
But long as god-like wish, or hope divine, 
Informs my spirit, ne’er can I believe 

That this magnificence is wholly thine! 
—From worlds not quickened by the sun 
A portion of the gift is won ; 

An intermingling of Heaven’s pomp is spread 
On ground which British shepherds tread ! 


And, if there be whom broken ties 
Afflict, or injuries assail, 

Yon hazy ridges to their eyes 

Present a glorious scale, 

Climbing suffused with sunny air, 

To stop—on record hath told where ! 
And tempting Fancy to ascend, 

And with immortal spirits blend ! 
—Wings at my shoulders seem to play ; 
But, rooted here, I stand and gaze 

On those bright steps that heavenward raise 
Their practicable way. 


Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad, 
And see to what fair countries ye are bound! ... 


Thus did Wordsworth look and behold a ladder set 
up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven, whither 
the bright steps raised their practicable way. 

Now let us look at another scene. It is night-time on 
the naked uplands of Palestine where “the Syrian stars 


DREAM OF THE HEAVENLY LADDER 85 


shine down.” In a shallow dip among those rolling hills 
along which the northward road stretches is a lonely 
traveller. Lying about on the hill slopes, on either side of 
him, are flat slabs of limestone, with here and there rough 
pillars or cairns standing out. The hill-sides are all curiously 
ridged or terraced. ‘This appearance is quite frequent in 
Palestine through the building up of artificial terraces for 
the growth of vines. But the limestone of the hills of 
Benjamin tends to form natural terraces, as it sometimes 
does, too, In our own country—on the flanks of Whernside, 
for example. Our traveller, overtaken by the fall of night, 
lies down on some flat bed of the limestone to sleep. “There 
is a field of loose stone*all around him, and, rising beyond 
It, that curiously ridged upward slope of the hills, which is 
the last image to fill his drowsy eyes as he falls into slumber. 
Then he dreams. And in his dream he still sees that 
strange hill-staircase; but it is no longer empty. It 1s 
populous with God’s messengers, going up and down upon 
it, busy with divine ministries. And from its summit 
sounds the solemn thunder of a great voice speaking down 
to him. When at length he wakes, he is awed and fearful, 
yet comforted. Surely he has been lying at heaven’s gate. 
And the voice of promise and reassurance he had heard 
while he slept was God’s voice. By good luck he has 
lighted upon the very dwelling-place of God, and slept in 
sanctuary. And God has been very gracious to him. A 
lonely traveller going forth from home on a far quest of 
doubtful issue, he has been made aware of the Divine 
Guardianship of Him who makes the night winds His 
angels, and the light of moon and stars His ministers. As 
the dawn came up Jacob arose and took the stone he had 
lain upon to set it up as a holy cairn to mark the spot for 
perpetual memorial, consecrating it with oil and vows. 
To him, as to our English poet, bright steps had raised a 
practicable way from earth to heaven. And we may be 
sure he went upon his journey with a new sense of confidence 


86 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


and good cheer. If in this barren and desolate spot he 
had so unexpectedly met with God, then surely God was 
not far from him at any time. He might at any moment 
come upon a Bethel, and find heaven’s gate swing open, 
showing him infinite vistas of eternal life. 

Ancient people instinctively seized upon such spots as 
had once yielded some manifestation of the Divine Presence, 
and regarded them as specially sacred, as likely to yield 
similar revelations again and again. A rock or a tree beside 
which some inspiration had once come to a man was regarded 
as a peculiar centre of divine communication. It has 
been so all over the world. And no doubt with justice, 
since association plays so great a part in preparing our minds 
for devout impressions, Rough cairns and monoliths seem 
to have been the first structures of worship everywhere, 
the first “houses of God.” ‘There were many Beth-El 
stones in Palestine, just as the sacred black stone at Meccah 
is still the great Beit-Allah of the Moslems. And in Greece 
at Delphi, anterior to any constructed temple, there were 
rude stones, anointed with oil by all the pilgrims who visited 
them, as Jacob’s stone was anointed. And when we see 
our own British cromlechs we see similar sacred memorials 
of some far off moment when our ancestors experienced 
something which made them strangely aware of deity. 
All these rough pillars are the progenitors of our towering 
cathedrals and mosques and temples in the civilized world, 
And we, too, feel, not indeed that God is localized, but that 
God is often most easily reached in such places as have been 
consecrated by long periods of human worship. Such 
places gather an atmosphere about them from incessant 
habit of sacred use which draws the mind to contemplate 
God and makes it impressible and responsive to spiritual 
promptings. And so, though a man may find God any- 
where, it is still good for us to have our places of sacred 
retreat, our definite altars, where the sense of God’s presence 
is kept perpetually before us, where in a guarded stillness 


DREAM OF THE HEAVENLY LADDER 87 


the sacred light burns, or the sacred food is preserved, and 
every carven stone and panel gives sign of devout aspiration ; 
where, turning in from the noise and dust of the outer 
world, we grow quiet and murmur to ourselves, “* How full 
of awe is this place! ‘This is none other than the House 
of God.” 

But the lesson of this old-world story is, probably, rather 
the reverse of this. It suggests, not that Jacob sought an 
already acknowledged shrine, but that the place became 
a shrine for the first time because of his vision there of 
the celestial ladder. He had found the divine presence in 
an expected and unpropitious place. The whole emphasis 
of the story is upon the grace of God in revealing Himself 
to such a man in such a spot. And it rather points the 
moral that no spot is too unpromising, no conditions too 
forlorn, for God to make Himself known within them to 
a prayerful heart. Francis ‘Thompson caught this truth 
of the old story and expressed it in those last verses of his 
when he looked back in retrospect to his time of agony as 
a homeless wanderer in the London streets—a mere human 
derelict and outcast to all appearance, starved and half-clad, 
wretchedly seeking sleep among other huddled waifs on 
the seats of the Thames Embankment. But even there 
and then he could view the invisible and clutch the in- 
apprehensible : 


The angels keep their ancient places ;— 
Turn but a stone and start a wing! 
"Tis ye, “tis your estranged faces, 

That miss the many-splendoured thing. 


But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) 
Cry ;—and upon thy so sore loss 

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder 
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross. 


Charing Cross a temple! A night on the Thames 
Embankment as place and hour of angelic communion ! 
It was the thrill of such a contrast that stirred Jacob on 


88 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


the barren uplands of Benjamin and made the story of his 
dream so everlastingly memorable in the annals of religion. 

And so it was that to a convict in the marble-quarries 
on Patmos came the shining vision of the Christ standing 
amid the seven churches on the mainland opposite, that 
lit up the pagan darkness around them like the seven- 
branched candlestick in the sanctuary at Jerusalem. Soit 
was that to a prisoner in Bedford Gaol came vision of the 
Delectable Mountains. So to the outcast slave-girl Hagar, 
struggling across the desert with her dying child, came the 
voice of God’s angel in succour. So David Livingstone 
in the heart of Africa, faced by a hostile and ominously 
threatening tribe, was ‘feeling much turmoil of spirit in 
view of having all my plans for the welfare of this great 
region knocked on the head by savages to-morrow. But 
Jesus came and said, ‘ All power is given to Me in heaven 
and on earth, and lo! I am with you always, even unto 
the end of the world.’”’ So again and again in the unlike- 
liest of places the ladder is set up from earth to heaven. 
Isaiah may see God and hear His summons amid the smoke 
of incense in the Holy of Holies, but Paul may see and 
hear Him on the open road as, rising over the shoulder of 
the hill, it gives for the first time a prospect of the white 
domes and minarets of a foreign city, sparkling there on the 
plain like a grain of salt. Our special altars exist but to 
teach us the universality of the sacramental Presence. In 
highways and byways, in desert and field and sea, at noon 
and at night, and to any man, sinner or saint, whose conscience 
is alive, the grace of God may come with succouring bene- 
diction ; and a dismal earth suddenly becomes the vestibule 
of heaven. Revelation ts localized only by the sensitiveness 
of our own souls in particular places and moments. It is 
never God who is silent but we who are deaf. And often 
it will be precisely when our surroundings seem most barren 
and squalid, when our own resources are exhausted and our 
self-reliance fails, that our dumb cry of uttermost need is 


DREAM OF THE HEAVENLY LADDER 89 


dramatically answered, and we find God beside us uttering 
words of startling promise, and we see the ethereal stairs, the 
golden gates. 

Maybe to most of us such moments of apocalypse are 
rare, if granted ever. But the religious life culminates 
in the open and perpetual vision of those who daily walk 
with God—not in the Old Testament revelation where 
God is seen once and again at an infrequent Bethel, but 
in the New Testament revelation where ‘hereafter ye 
shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and 
descending upon the Son of Man”; where, because we 
have seen God incarnate among us and His love is shed 
abroad in our hearts, we dwell in the house of the Lord for 
ever. Any locality will serve if the Son of Man be there. 
The inner spirit, not the outward situation, is the foundation 
where the heavenly ladder rests. When we reach our 
Sonship there is incessant commerce between the temporal 
and the eternal. No clouds and darkness screen the Father 
from us. No impassable gulf holds us out of reach of His 
hand. We dwell in God and He in us, and in our own 
spirits are erected the scala Facobi portaque eburnea. 


Her soul from earth to Heaven lies, 
Like the ladder in the vision, 
Whereon go 

To and fro, 

In ascension and demission, 
Star-flecked feet of Paradise. 


‘That is true of all the saints. Heaven and earth meet in 
them. ‘They and their Father are at one. And so the 
symbolism of this splendid old Hebrew legend becomes.an 
expression for the deepest experience and most sublime 
accomplishments of faith; for the permanent mystical 
union of the human and the divine in the perfect Son of 
Man, in whom we see “ the taking of our Manhood into 
God.” And the promise of our gospel is that our whole 
humanity may, through Him, be also taken up into God. 


go THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


By adherence to Him we may be grafted upon Him, until 
His life is our life, and we no longer live but Christ lives in 
us. Then the Son of Manhood reappears, even in us prodigal 
and scapegrace children ; and upon us, too, the angels are 
seen ascendent and descendent: just as the young Stephen, 
transfigured by his baptism into Christ, could stand in the 
prisoner’s dock with the vehement clamour of his enemies 
about him, and there see the heavens opened and the glory 
of God shining therein; and his own face in its rapture 
looked as it had been the face of an angel. ‘The dullest 
clay of our humanity may be irradiated and transfigured 
by the faith that discovers God’s presence. “The weakest 
and the meanest of us are called to be sons. We may grope 
for long enough in our ignorance and doubt, fumbling 
about the foot of “‘ the great altar-stairs which slope through 
darkness up to God.” But we shall find our footing at 
last and make our ascent. 

Sir James Frazer, in his Folk-lore in the Old Testament, 
tells us how the ancient Egyptians used pathetically to 
put little miniature ladders in the graves of their dead with 
the idea of helping the souls to climb to heaven. And in 
ancient, and even in modern, Russia a similar custom is 
found—small ladders being buried with the corpse; or 
little ladders of bread being baked at the funeral, in reminis- 
cence of the previous custom, the original meaning of which 
Is, perhaps, now forgotten. So indestructible is the hope 
of man that he is meant for a higher destiny than appears 
to our earth-bound vision. Through life and death we 
are called upward to God, who is our home. Primitive 
man feels this instinctively, and makes his pathetic provision 
for the ascent when this life is over. The Christian man 
rejoices 1n the open vision of God here and now. Now 
is the acceptable time, Here is eternal life—in the know- 
ledge of the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He has 
sent. ‘here are, indeed, far heights of experience yet 
to be climbed. But for the Christian the steps are visible 


DREAM OF THE HEAVENLY LADDER 91 


and practicable. His foot is already on the ladder, and 
ministering hands are about him on all sides. His citizenship 
is even now in heaven. His intercourse with God is secure. 
In the Father’s domain there are many camping-places ; 
but we know our destination and we know the route, and 
we know that God is with us all along the road. And so 
we pursue our pilgrimage with good cheer and hope and 
merriment. Out of the night of our doubts God has 
spoken to us, and we have seen His angels coming and going 
upon our loneliness ; and so with break of day we shoulder 
our baggage and tramp ahead with a gay courage 


On, to the bound of the waste, 
On, to the City of God. 





Vil 


WRESTLING WITH GOD 


And Jacob was left alone ; and there wrestled a man with him until 
the breaking of the day. 
GENESIS XXXil. 24. 


VII 
WRESTLING WITH GOD 


HE story of Jacob’s ladder shows us a man passively 
recipient of a divine inspiration which comes to him 
unexpectedly. Here is a complementary story in the life 
of Jacob which shows him winning a blessing from God 
by his own deliberate and even agonizing effort. And 
both stories are true as types of the soul’s mystical experi- 
ence. “There are hours when the grace of God seems to 
rain upon a man, and he feels a lilting ecstasy more buoyant 
than the physical glee of youth. ‘There are other hours 
when, despite all spiritual earnestness, the soul is dry and 
heavy ; and desperate struggle alone avails to win the 
craved blessing. ‘The lives of the saints will tell us how 
often they have to pass through the “ Dark Night of the 
Soul” before they win Union and Light. 

The original intent of the story here handed down to 
us is very obscure. People who are scholarly in these matters 
maintain various views. ‘lo some, for whom the patriarch 
is the symbol of a tribe rather than an historical individual, 
it may all suggest a struggle of the Jacob clan against some 
other clan with its protecting deity. Or others, for whom 
an individual man Jacob is the centre of the story, suggest 
that there was probably a sanctuary at Peniel where some 
god other than Yahweh was worshipped, and that Jacob, 
coming thither, managed by some force or magic to win a 
blessing from this deity, so that henceforth the Israelites 
had rights of worship there. And further, it is suggested 
that the curious episode of the halting upon the thigh refers 

95 


96 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


to some gesture in an old ritual dance at this particular 
sanctuary: the story of the wrestle being given as.a sup- 
posed explanation of the origin of the dance. Many of 
the folk-dances taught to English children to-day include 
actions reminiscent of some ancient religious custom or 
other. On the other hand, such explanations may some- 
times be plausibly invented to account for otherwise meaning- 
less ritual ; and it is suggested that such is the case in this 
story of Jacob. 

That it is very primitive in its religious standpoint 1s 
indicated by the way in which Jacob insists on knowing 
the name of his mysterious antagonist : it being a regular 
point of ancient magic to compel the utterance of an oppo- 
nent’s name. ‘To know the name was equivalent to having 
power over the possessor of the name. Hence all sorts of 
curious dodges and subterfuges among savage folk to keep 
their true names secret. And again, there is the stress laid 
upon the necessary departure of the spirit before break 
of day. ‘This 1s one of the commonest features in old folk- 
lore—as in the tales of the geni in the drabian Nights 
and many old fairy-tales, or as with the witches and ghosts 
of Shakespeare. 

However, the dim origins of this tale need not greatly 
concern us, As it appears in the Old Testament, whatever 
relics of earlier thought it may show, its meaning is clear 
and grand. ‘The writer who inserted it here has read his 
own spiritual meanings into the ancient folk-tale handed 
downtohim. It is no longer the spirit of a foreign sanctuary 
whom Jacob wrestles with, but the angel of Yahweh in 
human form—Jacob’s true God who, for the moment, 
has taken flesh, and struggles with him in the ford of Jabbok, 
He is human in form ; but Jacob knows when the struggle 
is over that it is God Himself that he has wrestled with. 
He has seen God face to face, and yet he lives. 

What a daring and tremendous conception it is, this 
wrestling of a poor lonely man with the very Godhead ! 


WRESTLING WITH GOD 97 


And how grateful we may feel to the quaint elements of 
the old primitive tradition which provided our Genesis 
writer with the hints on which he founded so moving and 
memorable a tale ! 

In the story as it is given to us Jacob is once again at a 
crisis in his career. Since that long past day when, flying 
from Esau’s vengeance, he had been comforted with the 
angelic visitation at Bethel, Jacob had been living far away 
in the Hauran. He had married and got a family. He 
had acquired great wealth. And now he is venturing to 
return to his own country, quite uncertain how Esau will 
receive him. His conscience is uneasy. Will Esau forgive 
and forget? Or will there be revenge waiting for him 
when he crosses the stream? ‘The morrow will decide ; 
for he has already sent messengers to Esau, and has heard 
of the latter’s approach with four hundred men—a force 
that, to his timid conscience, suggests battle rather than 
reconciliation. Jacob’s anxiety prompts him to two actions : 
he sends on ahead of him a great caravan of presents for 
Esau—droves of camels and cattle and sheep—in the hope 
of mollifying Esau’s anger ; and he spends the night saying 
his prayers. 

It is a really penitent man who is pictured to us—one 
doing his best to make amends for an old wrong, and to 
preserve his innocent family from any vengeance that his 
own fault might have warranted. And Jacob’s is not an 
easy-going penitence. It may have arisen out of fear ; 
but there is a passionate moral alarm in it, and a great craving 
for spiritual succour. Such agony of mind demands soli- 
tude. And so Jacob sends his family and all his gear over- 
stream, that he may be alone with God. And in the black 
night on those moorlands east of Jordan, somewhere near 
the spot where the Jabbok brook flows into the main river, 
he finds himself with God, indeed, in a very soul-shaking 
way. So intense is his struggle for guidance and power and 
peace that to his imagination—or anyhow to the imagination 


7 


98 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


of those who heard some hint of his experience after- 
wards—it was as though he wrestled in sheer muscular 
tussle with flesh and blood. He sweated in prayer, in a 
strong agony of spiritual struggle—like Luther throwing the 
inkpot across his study at the devil, as if at an actual physical 
presence. 

The anthropomorphism of this story is astonishingly 
frank and vivid; but I think it is clear that the Genesis 
writer intends us to see in it an allegory of inward strife. 
He is spiritualizing an older and cruder form of the story, 
which still determines the shape of it; but the soul of it 
is a new thing in his hands. He ts reading in the life of 
the old patriarch a spiritual episode which foreshadows 
those awful night-watches in Gethsemane when the sweat 
fell from our Lord’s brow as it were drops of blood. 

And later ages have inevitably taken this weird and sombre 
tale as an allegory of the soul’s struggle in prayer. Charles 
Wesley has so fixed it once and for all in his noble hymn, 
‘“Come, O Thou traveller unknown.” And Francis 
Thompson in his essay entitled “ Sanctity and Song”’ links 
up the Old ‘Testament story with one of the Canticles 
attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, which figures the soul’s 
prayer as a warfare with Christ in which the soul falls to 
the ground pierced by Christ’s lance, only to be raised again 
by Him: 

So keen and fresh that I 


That moment could have scorned 
To join the saints on high. 


And thus revivified, the soul returns to the conflict ; and, 
at last, “‘ I conquered Christ my Lord.” 

Aye! for so love teaches us, through its disciplines of 
pain and piercing, to win that hardihood of utter self- 
abandonment which makes God yield Himself to our 
importunity. 

In the Divine Dialogue of St. Catherine of Sienna, the 
Voice of God declares: “I withdraw Myself from her 


WRESTLING WITH GOD 99 


sentiment, depriving her of former consolations, in order 
to humiliate her, and cause her to seek Me intruth. Then, 
if she love Me without thought of self, and with lively 
faith and with hatred of her own sensuality, she rejoices 
in the time of trouble, deeming herself unworthy of peace 
and quietness of mind. . . . Though she perceives that 
I have withdrawn Myself, she does not on that account 
look back, but perseveres with humility in her exercises. 
. . . Once more do J leave her that she may see and know 
her defects, so that, feeling herself deprived of consolation 
and afflicted by pain, she may recognize her own weakness, 
and learn how incapable she is of stability or perseverance, 
thus cutting down to the very root of spiritual self-love : 
for this should be the end and purpose of all her self-know- 
ledge, to rise above herself, digging up the root of self-love 
with the knife of self-hatred and the love of virtue.” In 
such manner do the saints describe their struggle to hold 
on to a God who seems reluctant to bless them, who seems 
to withdraw Himself from them, only that they may the 
better learn their utter dependence upon Him; that they 
may empty themselves the more completely of all self-content, 
however subtly spiritualized, in order to open their souls 
absolutely and make room for Him who Is to be all in all. 
This struggle after an apparently withdrawing God Is normal 
in the psychological development of the greater saints and 
mystics, And as John Tauler says of such: ‘°° According 
to their own ideas they are the farthest off from God, and 
yet they are the nearest. They imagine that of all they 
are the castaways, and yet they are the very elect.” 

Prayer is so shallow a thing with most of us that the 
language of the saints may seem like jargon from a strange 
planet. But true prayer is just as real and creative an 
energy in the realm of the spirit as the pursuit of any art 
or science is in the realm of the mind, or any athletic exercise 
in the realm of the body. It is the soul’s gymnastic ; and 
a man’s spiritual power and quality grow thereby, as his 


100 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


muscles do by devotion to a special sport, or his brains by. 


application to a special line of study. And the talk of the 
saints and mystics is but a discussion of the technique of 
prayer—meaningless or irksome to the outsider, as technical 
discussions always are, but full of instruction to those 
who make any serious effort at such exercise of the soul. 
Where the language of the mystics may seem outré, and too 
far aloof from us, we may, however, submit to be guided 
by a famous novelist. Few writers have said more wise 
things about prayer than George Meredith. “It cleanses 
the nature,” he says in a letter to a friend; “it rouses 
up and cleanses the nature, and searches us through to find 
what weare.” ‘To his boy he wrote: “ Prayer for strength 
of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift 
it seeks.” Or take this noble passage of old Dr. Shrapnell’s 
in Beauchamp’s Career: ‘‘'Vake this for the good in prayer, 
that it makes us repose on the unknown with confidence, 
makes us flexible to change, makes us ready for revolution 
—for life, then! He who has the fountain of prayer in 
him will not complain of hazards. Prayer is the recognition 
of laws; the soul’s exercise and source of strength ; its 
thread of conjunction with them. . . . Cast forth the soul 
in prayer, you meet the efHluence of the outer truth, you 
join with the creative elements giving breath to you; and 
that crust of habit which is the soul’s tomb ; and custom, 
the soul’s tyrant ; and pride, our volcano-peak that sinks us 
in a crater; and fear, which plucks the feathers from the 
wings of the soul and sits it naked and shivering in a vault, 
where the passing of a common hodman’s foot above sounds 
like the king of terrors coming—you are free of them, you 
live in the day and for the future, by this exercise and disci- 
pline of the soul’s faith.” Meredith saw that prayer was a 
real energy, working changes in men; and he sums up 
the philosophy of it in his famous aphorism : “‘ Who rises 
from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.” Most 
vitally true that word is, and crying out to be declared among 


WRESTLING WITH GOD 101 


us. But the mystics will go on to teach us what terrific 
wrestling will be needed before any poor measure of better- 
ment makes itself felt and seen ; what an infinite vista of 
change and growth prayer opens up ; and how arduous much 
of the way will be. It is a long journey from hell to 
heaven ; and yet the human soul can say of itself: “I 
myself am heaven and hell.” And prayer is the long road 
by which a man ascends from one to the other. 

However, the happy truth is that change is possible to 
us through prayer, albeit the discipline is sharp and long, 
Jacob wrestles through the live-long night, but in the morn- 
ing he is a new man with a new name—no longer Jacob, the 
supplanter, the trickster, but Israel, God’s warrior, trained 
in the lists by God Himself. He is a new man because he 
has clung on to God through the night of doubt and fear 
with all the strength of such poor faith as he possessed, 
and now, with the dawn, he sees God’s face and discovers 
the ineffable Name. 

We are all searching for that Name. In the sweat of 
intellectual effort after truth, the long patience of research 
till we grasp one more fragment of reality, one more fact 
that adds its ray of light to life’s meaning—in all this men 
are struggling to name that which is hidden behind this 
pageant of hills and skies and seas ; of human beings living 
and dying; of the rise and fall of nations; of changing 
eras; of the creation and extinction of the very stars. 

And in all the work of human art, that struggle to per- 
ceive and establish beauty through manipulation of sound 
and form and colour; and in all the labour of human love 
toward social amelioration—the relief of sickness, the 
reclamation of the wayward, the delivery of the oppressed — 
what are men doing but seeking to demonstrate the truth 
and power of a Name revealed to them as the veritable 
designation of God? One might say with justice that 
the human advance in religion has come about step by 
step as men named God afresh—as they perceived a new 


102 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


truth about Him, It was a gigantic step forward when the 
old Hebrews learnt to speak of God as “ the Eternal who 
loveth righteousness.” It was the crown of revelation 
when, through Jesus Christ, men learnt to name Him love. 
But even in this old tale of Jacob, the idea that God’s true 
name, His essential character, is revealed as loving-kindness 
has its foreshadowing. For when Jacob meets with his 
brother later in the day, and is overwhelmed by Esau’s 
magnanimity and good-will, he declares: “I have seen 
thy face, as one seeth the face of God, and thou wast pleased 
with me.”’ Esau’s magnanimity is the mirror of God. 
It is such a loving spirit as Esau incarnates that Jacob’s 
prayer had taught him to recognize as God’s Spirit. He 
had found that God forgave, that God was love ; and the 
new faith made him a new man. 

At bottom we all have to find out God’s Name for our- 
selves. It is all very well for some one to tell us that God 
is love, but we need to feel this in our own experience if 
the faith is to become our very own, affecting us vitally. 
Those who seek to evangelize us must make us see the Face 
of God in their own faces, as Esau did to Jacob; they must 
demonstrate the divine power of love triumphing over evil. 
We cannot learn God’s Name by hearsay; we must 
wrestle for it in our inward struggle after spiritual vision. 
But we may be blessedly confirmed in our conviction when 
we see the divine character shining forth in the humanity 
of our fellow-men. No doubt we may help each other 
somewhat by argument and instruction, making for a 
better-proportioned outlook upon life, a saner judgment 
of the facts. But we can really evangelize and convert 
only by demonstrating in our own lives the presence and 
power of that God we name as Love and Righteousness. 
Even then, however clearly this God be evidenced and 
illustrated, as He is in all fulness in Jesus Christ, the individual 
soul has still to grapple on to Him with intense, persistent 
effort, before God lodges in the soul itself, an abiding Guest, 


WRESTLING WITH GOD 103 


and to doubt Him becomes as impossible as to doubt one’s 
own existence. ‘There can be no escape from the discipline 
of prayer as the foundation of enlightenment and conviction. 
Vital faith becomes ours only by the soul’s agonta. 

But for those who do honestly wrestle—facing, if need 
be, the dark night of the soul—light does come, for God 
is love, and it is His blessed will that all men should come 
to a knowledge of the truth which makes them free. 


Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal 

Thy new, unutterable Name? 

Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell : 

To know it now resolved I am: 
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go, 
Till I Thy Name, Thy Nature, know. 


°Tis Love! tis Love! Thou diedst for me, 
I hear Thy whisper in my heart ! 

The morning breaks, the shadows flee ; 

Pure universal Love Thou art! 

To me, to all, Thy mercies move ; 

Thy Nature, and Thy Name, is Love! 


My prayer hath power with God; the grace 
Unspeakable I now receive ; 

Through faith I see Thee face to face, 

I see Thee face to face, and live: 

In vain I have not wept and strove ; 

Thy Nature, and Thy Name, is Love. 


And so the soul stands in morning light on Peniel, lamed 
with battle maybe, but at rest; having wrested to itself 
the peace of God, which passes understanding because it 
is no fruit of the understanding, but of that intuitive insight 
of the soul which is developed by the energy of prayer. It 
has awakened to God, and Is satisfied with His likeness. 


= ay; 


ath, fo iq . ’ ‘ ‘ aa 


BAS 
| ie - 


» M r 





Vill 


THE BABE AFLOAT 


And when the mother could no longer hide the child, she took for 
him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch 
and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s 
brink. 

EXODUS ii. 3. 


——— a 


VIII 
THE BABE AFLOAT 


ERE is the old tale, known to us from infancy, 

about the birth of Moses: how he was laid in a 
basket on the Nile and discovered there by the Princess of 
Egypt, and taken to be reared in the King’s palace. A 
delightful story, pretty and happy as a fairy-tale! And 
every mother who reads it must feel the mercy and the 
hope of it—this tiny, helpless life apparently cast into such 
peril, and then so graciously rescued by a royal condescension 
and led from poverty and obscurity to live amid king’s 
courts, and to become the saviour of a people. ‘The story 
is a type of the providential care which we would fain believe 
guards the lives of all little children sent forth into this 
perilous world. It expresses the anxious pity of the adult 
heart for babyhood, and its faith that He who creates is 
also He who will guard to the end. 

This story is not the special property of the Jews; it 
is a legend that has been told all over the world in places 
widely separate. In Babylon, in Greece, in Rome, in 
Germany, and in Japan, and I dare sayin many other regions, 
the same or some similar story has been handed down the 
ages: of how a child was launched out upon life’s river 
alone and helpless, and how some merciful care stooped to 
protect it, and brought it at last to the palace of the king. 
Perhaps the oldest instance of it is the story found among 
the clay tablets of ancient Babylon, which runs like this : 
“Sargina, the powerful King, the King of Agade am I. 
My mother was poor, my father I knew not; the brother 


107 


108 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


of my father lived in the mountains. . . . My mother, 
who was poor, conceived me, and secretly gave birth to 
me; she placed me in a basket of reeds, she shut up the 
mouth of it with bitumen, she abandoned me to the river, 
which did not overwhelm me. ‘The river bore me away, 
and brought me to Akki the Irrigator. Akki the Irri- 
gator” (a rain-god, presumably) “received me in the 
goodness of his heart. Akki the Irrigator reared me to 
boyhood. Akki the Irrigator made me a gardener. My 
service as a gardener was pleasing unto Istar, and I became 
King.” 

Similarly the Japanese legend tells how the first child of 
Tyanagi and Jyanami, the parents of gods and men, was 
set adrift in an ark of reeds. And the same sort of tale 
has crept into our own literature, as, for example, in the 
case of Shakespeare’s Perdita. Again and again the heroes 
of the race have been pictured as born amid poverty and 
danger, and then wonderfully rescued and exalted to the 
highest places. These stories are all echoes of the voice of 
faith deep in the heart of man that God is He “‘ who hath 
put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted them 
of low degree.” And more than that: they are echoes 
from the voice of faith in every parent’s heart that God the 
All-Father is not willing that the least of His little ones 
should perish, but that, having brought them to life, He will 
watch over them and hold them in His safe keeping whatso- 
ever comes, 

Surely this old tale of the Babe Afloat carries its message 
still to all anxious-hearted parents who have set the little 
frail crafts of their children’s lives on the great stream of 
the world. Such fragile little things they are, and such a 
dangerous adventure they are beginning, that you almost 
wonder as you look at them whether you were wise to take 
the risk of launching them amid such treacherous currents. 
You feel that you would like to hold them by you for ever 
lest disaster should fall on them, as Sir Austin Feverel 


THE BABE AFLOAT 109 


“wished to be Providence to his son.” But alas! you 
cannot. ‘There they are, launched forth as little independent 
beings, each with his own life-voyage ahead of him, which 
he must travel alone. None, not even his mother, can. 
go with him. She can only keep watch from far off to see 
what befalls, and interfere now and then to offer some help. 
The child is distinct and separate, a personality acting on 
its own will and fulfilling its own destiny. Its life-voyage 
is a new event, without strict precedent or parallel ; and 
with whatever care you build its ark, and cement it to keep 
the evil from leaking in, yet, once launched, the child is 
his own pilot, and you can but stand on the shores of his 
life and watch him sail away. ‘The venture has appalling 
risk. Down-stream he floats on the tides of time, and he 
may land in heaven or he may land in hell. He may keep 
a straight course from the beginning, or he may sail upon 
rocks and quicksands and incur all manner of shocking 
catastrophes. His course is not within your determination. 
You, use your utmost care to give him a fair start, and 
yet it 1s possible for his will to undo all your best provision 
and to contradict all your dearest purposes. It does happen 
at times that the children for whom anxious prayers have 
been offered and costly sacrifices made, nevertheless drift 
away into miserable and shameful places. ‘That is a possi- 
bility. That is the great risk of birth. 

But that is not the whole of the story of human life 
and love. It would be foolish to minimize the danger ; 
but it would be treason against God if we thought of the 
danger alone, and not also of the providence of His Spirit 
interweaving its rule amid the chances and changes of our 
life, and opening up the way of escape. No thoughtful 
and sensitive men and women would ever dare to bring 
children into this world unless they relied upon a funda- 
mental belief that in spite of all, at the long last, through 
whatever evil misadventures, these children would win 
home to safety and joy ; unless they believed that there was 


TIO THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


a Grace in the universe which stoops to help its children, 
as Pharaoh’s daughter stooped to Moses, and will not leave 
them succourless, 

It is precisely this trust that our religion establishes and 
our sacrament of baptism proclaims, We assert that the 
world is not the sport of chance, but the design of good-will ; 
that when God creates a child He will never lose hold of 
that child, but will pursue him through all his ignorant 
wanderings and wilful mischiefs, saving him at last, even 
though it be by fire. We assert that being God’s child 
he is an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven, and not the 
kingdom of hell; and that if he ever gets imprisoned in 
the latter, it still is his prison, not his home, and he cannot 
be satisfied to be there for ever—he will win his way out. 
We assert that, though a child should awhile be lost, in 
this world of Our Father’s he will be found again. We 
assert that there is a great main current of love in the stream 
of life which sooner or later brings all men home. ‘The 
backwoodsmen of America tie their logs in rafts and leave 
them to drift rudderless on the great rivers, because they 
know that, however slow. the journey, the raft will come 
at last to its destination on the coast, since “‘ even the weariest 
river winds somewhere safe to sea.” And so generation 
after generation humanity launches out its children, believing 
that, although they go forth alone amid great perils, there 
is a Current of divine love flowing through life which will 
carry them at last to the desired haven. ‘That is the good, 
hopeful doctrine upon which our sacrament of baptism 
ultimately rests. 

Father, father, where are you going? 
Oh do not walk so fast! 


Speak, father, speak to your little boy, 
Or else I shall be lost. 


The night was dark, no father was there, 
The child was wet with dew ; 

The mire was deep, and the child did weep, 
And away the vapour flew. 


THE BABE AFLOAT III 


So sings William Blake, with his lovely simplicity, about 
The Little Boy Lost. But then he adds the companion 
poem on The Little Boy Found : 

The little boy lost in the lonely fen, 
Led by the wandering light, 


Began to cry, but God, ever nigh, 
Appeared like his father, in white. 


He kissed the child, and by the hand led, 
And to his mother brought, 

Who in sorrow pale, through the lonely dale, 
The little boy weeping sought. 

In these verses, or in the kindred ones about the Little 
Girl Lost and Found, that dear magician, Blake, preaches 
the very essence of that Christian faith we hold in a grace 
that guards all life, into the care of which we commit our 
children. 

Do you ask for proof of the truth of this happy creed ? 
Do you want evidence of the “‘ love that rulesthe sun and all 
the stars”? ? Jesus Christ bade men look for the evidence 
in their own hearts. A shepherd is restless and inconsolable 
until he has found a straysheep : Even so—that is our Lord’s 
argument—even so must you judge the heart of the Eternal. 
Has the human creature invented a quality of which the 
Divine Creator is devoid? Isthe Unseen Source less noble 
than its issue? Or is the word true: “ He that hath seen 
Me hath seen the Father” ? 

Read such a tale as Tennyson’s AZzpah, and see human 
mother-love crooning over the scattered bones of a criminal 
hung from the gallows at some windy cross-roads. “Io one 
human heart the criminal is still a child to be cherished. 
Night after night the widowed mother climbs the hill to 
pick up any fresh fragment of his weather-bitten bones 
that may have fallen from the clanking cage. There is a 
love stronger than sin, stronger than death. Whence came 
it? ‘That comfortable person, Mrs. Winthrop, in George 
Eliot’s story, gives the only sane answer, when she is 
discussing deep conundrums of theology with Silas Marner ; 


112 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


“It allays comes into my head when I’m sorry for folks, 
and feel as I can’t do a power to help ’em, not if I was to 
get up i’ the middle o” the night—it comes into my head 
as Them above has got a deal tenderer heart nor what 
I’ve got—for I can’t be anyways better nor Them as made 
me ; and if anything looks hard to me, it’s because there’s 
things I don’t know on; and for the matter o’ that, there 
may be plenty o” things I don’t know on, for it’s little as 
I know—that it is. And that’s all as ever I can be sure 
on, and everything else is a big puzzle to me when I think 
on it. And all as we’ve got to do is to trusten, Master 
Marner—to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to 
trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit 0’ good 
and rights, we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights 
bigger nor what we can know—I feel it i? my own inside 
as it must be so.” Mrs. Winthrop’s theology was soundly 
Christian. The evidence for our faith in love as ultimate 
in power, in love as God, lies in what we actually see of 
love’s operations in this world triumphing again and again 
over evil, and refusing to recognize defeat. 

Now this faith in the rescuing grace of God is what 
we proclaim through our Christian sacrament of baptism. 
In baptizing our children we declare our faith in a love 
that lies deeper than man’s deepest hate ; and we seek to 
put them into the fellowship of those who are pledged 
to this faith, so that this divine love may be transmitted 
to them without hindrance. A fellowship of those who 
really believe that God 1s Love is an ark into which any 
child may be safely placed for his crossing of “‘ the waves of 
this troublesome world.” ‘That is the point of the doctrine 
of baptismal regeneration. ‘That doctrine asserts that, 
despite the evil in which they are born, children are never- 
theless God’s offspring, and will show themselves to be 
such if they are put into their right spiritual environment 
—that ark of Christian fellowship which is the vehicle of 
the regenerating Spirit. Get them placed there and you 


| 





THE BABE AFLOAT 113 


need have no qualms about the peril of their birth, but 
only a glad thanksgiving. You may boldly make the 
hazardous experiment of replenishing the earth, for you 
are confident that, perilous and awful as the world is where 
our lonely wills can work such havoc, it is nevertheless our 
Father’s home, where He rules, where His will must ulti- 
mately be done. And ifa child is placed where the love of 
God is fully mediated to Him, His true nature will blossom 
out surely enough 3 he will become a child of grace, and not 
a child of disgrace. 

The Christian sacrament of baptism shouts out a great 
hope to men. It embodies a glorious optimism. It says 
very frankly that life is a perilous business; that human 
nature, unless it is awakened to the love of God, is a dismal 
and perverse thing, full of all rottenness. You are, there- 
fore, taking an overwhelming and unjustifiable risk in 
launching a child into the world unless you perceive that 
there are means, and make effort to secure the means, by 
which you can surround it by redeeming influences that 
will draw out its potential Divine Sonship. “Those means 
exist. “They exist in the Church—not, alas ! very evidently 
in anything and everything which calls itself a church, 
because so many churches may be but dead limbs in the Body 
of Christ. But they exist wherever the Church is approxi- 
mately true to its own ideal. It may certainly be claimed 
that these redeeming influences exist wherever a faith in 
divine love is creating true fellowship among men, whether 
such fellowship calls itself a church or no, and whether 
it employs any rite of initiation or no. ‘To surround a 
child with the atmosphere of godly love is the essential 
regenerative deed. But this is dramatized by the sacra- 
ment of baptism, in which we plant a child into the historic 
body of believers in a redeeming God—the Christian 
Ecclesia—regarded as the centre of operation of the regener- 
ating agencies of God’s love, the main conduit of the Holy 
Ghost Here, in the Christian fellowship, despite all mis- 

8 


114 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


apprehensions, contortions and mystifications of the doctrine, 
and despite all laxity and apostasy of practice, the great 
faith has been taught and acted upon down the ages, that a 
Rescuer awaits the Babe Afloat who will bring him to dwell 
in king’s chambers. Here, in the Christian fellowship— 
exactly in so far as it is really Christian, exactly in so far 
as the faith in a Divine Grace is really operative—is the 
theatre of all those influences of divine love mediated through 
men which provide the regenerating environment for the 
world’s children. Here, in technical Christian parlance, is 
the chief sphere of the Holy Spirit. Here, therefore, is 
the Ark in which a child setting out upon his life’s adven- 
ture needs to be placed. It does not provide a magic charm 
against disaster. It does not determine a child’s destiny 
against, or apart from, his own free choices. But it pro- 
vides the saving environment in which right choices have 
the scale weighted in their favour. No one would doubt 
the efficacy of baptism into the Church if the Church 
were thoroughly and unquestionably Christian. Men will 
very properly shrink from baptizing their children into a 
fanatical sect, or into a snobbish class-conscious group, or 
into a vague indeterminate mass that lacks distinguishing 
principles, And the visible churches look too often like 
one or other of these things. What claims to be the Body 
of Christ appears an unwholesome and paralytic organism, 
Instead of a seaworthy craft that men would scramble 
with alacrity to be aboard of for safety in the storm, they 
see a derelict with broken masts and uncaulked seams ; 
and they distrust the promise of safety held out to them. 
But, if the ship leaks, it has not thrown its captain over- 
board. Despite all blunder and failure it is inside the 
Church that Christ is to be found. His presence has 
restored and re-invigorated it again and again. “The deposit 
of His power is there, often rusting in disuse, yet waiting 
to be rediscovered, and always, when re-employed, showing 
its inexhaustible efficacy. 


THE BABE AFLOAT 15 


And so the old legend of the Babe in the Ark remains 
to picture a great truth of our gospel—a truth admittedly 
blurred by the Church’s apostasy, yet still a truth. Our 
children need not be launched helpless upon their dangerous 
earthly adventure. ‘They are born to be kings, royally 
free and wealthy in all noble equipments. And such they 
shall become, if we do our part in providing opportunity 
for God’s good grace to operate upon them. We are 
increasingly careful of their bodily welfare in our modern 
societies. With our health-visitors and our school clinics 
and many other agencies we are endeavouring to secure for 
them an adequate physical opportunity in life. But their 
adequate spiritual opportunity is given only as we succeed 
in immersing them in Christ, in surrounding them with 
all the gracious and holy influences that derive from Him. 
If they find themselves in Him, they will understand their 
inheritance as sons of God, sharers in a heavenly kingdom. 
Earth, despite all its pains, will be recognized as a good gift 
for those who accept it with courage and loyalty. The 
peril of the great river of life is not purposeless, nor will these 
children find themselves the sport of a careless tyrant who 
leaves them undefended to drift into chaos. ‘They are 
the creatures of Eternal Love. Succour is at hand for 
them always. ‘Their destiny is a princely one. 

But they will not and cannot believe all this unless a 
saving love really does surround them. Where the faith 
of the Church is absent men, reflecting on the helplessness 
of childhood, are reduced to the desperate sadness of such 
words as these of Thomas Hardy’s, when, in describing 
in his Tess of the D? Urbervilles the string of young children 
in the feckless John Durbeyfield’s family, he says: “ All 
these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship 
—entirely dependent on the judgment of the two Durbey- 
field adults for their pleasures, their necessities, their health, 
even their existence. If the heads of the Durbeyfield 
household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, 


116 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen 
little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them 
—six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they 
wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for 
it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the 
shiftless house of Durbeyfield.” Later in the story, on 
the evening before the fatherless family is to be turned out 
of the old cottage home, Tess gathers the younger children 
about the fire, and they sing hymns they have learnt in 
Sunday school. The young voices move ‘Tess to tears, 
and she turns away to the window to hide them. “If 
she could only believe what the children were singing ; 
if she were only sure, how different all would now be ; 
how confidently she would leave them to Providence and 
their future kingdom. But to Tess, as to not a few millions 
of others, there was ghastly satire in the poet’s lines— 


Not in utter nakedness 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come. 


To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading 
personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in’ the 
result seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate.”” 
The aching sadness of such words as those is inevitable 
except where a faith in Divine Love comes effectively to 
baptize children into a saving and happy environment. 
Without this, birth does indeed seen hapless and unjusti- 
fiable. But our gospel is that, if it seems so, it is because 
we are failing to mediate God’s love to childhood. It is our 
fault, our own fault, our own most grievous fault. The 
Church exists to remedy such ghoulish circumstance which 
the devilry of human carelessness brings about ; and to 
make it clear to all that there is a fellowship of love waiting 
to receive all children and work upon them regeneratingly. 
In a really Christian society, if the parents fail, the children 
are not left succourless : they are members of a body which 
recognizes responsibility for them and does its best to bring 
» 


THE BABE AFLOAT 417 


to bear upon them the rescuing grace of God. Hardy’s 
grim words provide just the basis that is needed for a recog- 
nition of the utter necessity of baptizing children into a 
fellowship inspired by God’s love, as the only tolerable 
condition upon which childhood should be allowed to 
enter the world at all. Such a fellowship is the only ark 
that can safely carry them through the waves of this perilous 
world. And that fellowship may and does exist wherever 
“the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy 
Ghost.” 

The little Durbeyfields had no doubt been formally 
christened at the parish church. But they had received 
there only the sentiment of the hymns they learnt—enough 
to move wistful longings in Tess’s heart, and in their own 
as they grew older, but no more. The Church had not 
been vital and effective enough to convert their parents, 
or substantially to succour the children themselves when left 
forlorn. But such failure of the Church in practice does 
not alter the ideal truth the Church is set to proclaim. We 
have still to declare, still to try ever harder to demonstrate, 
that there is no child so forlornly circumstanced but that the 
love of God, if brought into effective operation through 
the Church which professes to embody it, is adequate to 
redeem it from all things that harm and hate, and make it 
the inheritor of a glorious kingdom of joy and peace. 

Like little Cinderella in her ragged clothes, who is clad 
gloriously by a fairy god-mother, so any child may be trans- 
figuringly clothed upon by Christ, if the Church provides a 
true god-parentage for it. And then the love of the dear 
Prince claims the child’s soul |! She may still fail in obedi- 
ence, being human only—a little person of good intent, but 
not altogether wise as yet. But the Prince loves her, and 
pursues her, infallibly identifying her beneath all disguises of 
that old ragged self of hers—that childhood of disgrace, 
because he has in his keeping the unstained crystal slipper— 
her footprint in that transfigured hour when her real self as 


118 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


a child of grace shone out delightfully. And so, for sure, 
he finds her again, and carries her back to the palace ; and 
the curtain of the story falls upon the bridegroom with his 
bride. ‘That happy fairy-tale is but another allegory of the 
redeeming love of Christ, who, calling His children to Him, 
strips off the old self and clothes them with the new self, and 
marries them to the Ideal, to the Well-Beloved Son. 

Baby Moses in the bulrushes ; Cinderella in the kitchen 
—these are types of the world’s children destined to be 
rescued by the grace of God and translated into the 
Kingdom of Heaven. 


IX 


THE BURNING BUSH 


of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush 
with fire, and the bush was not consumed. 


i 





IX 


THE BURNING BUSH 


HE peninsula of Sinai, although in ancient times rather 

better wooded and possessing more grassy valleys 
than now, has always been a “ great and terrible wilderness.” 
Its huge granite peaks, rising to nine thousand feet, fall in 
shudderingly steep cliffs to the very beach of the Gulf of 
Akabah on the east ; on the west they leave a narrow plain 
between their base and the waters of the Gulf of Suez ; 
on the north this mountain triangle is bounded by a narrow 
stretch of desert sand, from which rises again the great 
limestone plateau called the desert of the Tih. Sinai is a 
turbulent confusion of dark red hills, streaked with dark 
green and purple—a tossed wilderness of wave-like rocks 
full of smouldering colour. It is a skeleton of a land, a 
land stripped to the bone. Some few valleys are still ver- 
durous, but on the summits there is blank aridity, utter 
desolation. And the land is shrouded in deathly silence. 
No sound of falling water, no hum of insects, no whispering 
leaves break the appalling stillness. Voices can, in conse- 
quence, be heard at such incredible distances that it is a 
saying of the Arabs that one can be heard across the whole 
breadth of the Gulf of Akabah. ‘The only music in this 
gigantic mountain waste is the mournful booming of the 
sand-drifts as they dislodge themselves on the slopes, giving 
rise to the legend of a subterranean convent sounding its 
bell for prayer—the loosened sand making a loud swelling 


din like a wetted finger drawn across glass, as Doughty 
I21I 


adi 


122 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


describes it in his Travels in Arabia Deserta, or like the 
lingering reverberations after the chime of a great bell. 
There are many indications that far back in history there 
was more pasturage in the valleys and more bush on the 
hills than is now discoverable. The Arabs have cut down 
a large part of the scant growth of desert trees—the acacias, 
in particular, which afford a poor traffic in charcoal, as of 
old their very hard timber, shittim wood, was used for the 
furniture of the tabernacle and other buildings. It was a 
kindred bush, the senna, or acacia nilotica—a thorn that 
flowers with yellow blossoms—that probably gave the name 
‘Sinai’? to this district. It is a plant that will grow in 
granite grit where nothing else will grow. And it was 
this bush, perhaps, which Moses saw all aflame with God. 
He had been brought up, according to tradition, at 
Pharaoh’s Court, in the heart of the great Egyptian civiliza- 
tion, All the luxury then possible to man had been at 
his disposal. It was the magnificent age of the great 
Ramesses II, who employed the Hebrews and many other 
foreigners in slave-labour on his great architectural designs, 
and “‘ made their lives bitter in mortar and brick.” But 
Moses himself escaped the fate of his fellow-countrymen 
through his good luck in being adopted by the Princess. 
His youth was not burdened with toil, but quickened by the 
tuition of the best scholars, the society and converse of the 
imperial palace, the recreations of aristocratic ease. But 
he was a Hebrew still; and the fierce patriotism burnt 
in his soul which all down the ages has marked out that 
people and kept them an intact race through hundreds of 
years though scattered to every land on earth. One day 
he came across a slave-driver flogging a Hebrew. ‘The 
sight made his blood boil with generous indignation, and, 
seeing no witnesses about, he pummelled the fellow to death 
and buried him in the sand. And no doubt he stalked 
back to the palace with his head full of Utopian plans for 
the deliverance of his brethren from their servitude—all 


THE BURNING BUSH 123 


the heat of youth’s generous passion and hopeful imagination 
burning in his breast. But like every other inexperienced 
reformer he had yet to learn the rottenness of the human 
material he was planning to help. The very next day 
he tries to appease a quarrel between two Hebrews. But 
instead of accepting his advice and leadership they turn on 
him with angry taunts, wanting to know whom he is going 
to kill next. His deed of yesterday was carelessly bruited 
abroad by the very people on whose behalf the rash and 
terrible, if unselfish, thing had been done. Very quickly it 
reached the ears of Pharaoh, and then Moses had to flee 
for his life. “The only escape for him out of Egypt was 
eastward to Arabia, where at least he would be among 
Semitic peoples, distantly akin to his own. So he came to 
Sinal, and settled among a tribe of Midianites or Arabs 
at the head of the Gulf of Akabah, becoming at once servant 
and son-in-law to a great desert sheikh named Jethro. 

It was a strange alteration of life to a city-bred man— 
like a Londoner being suddenly pitched on to a ranch in > 
the American West. But Moses was a highly trained 
man. ‘The later Jewish stories which tell of his prowess 
as an army leader in Ethiopia, or of his inventive genius 
as an engineer in Egypt, may be fanciful ; but he had been 
educated, it is said, at Heliopolis, the university of that old 
Egyptian world, and so had the trained understanding 
which could quickly pick up the very different lore of the 
desert tribes with their business of nomadic shepherding. 
But it meant rough and dangerous living. It meant cater- 
ing for yourself, and depending on your own wits for safety 
and comfort. It meant learning all the tips that a good 
scout acquires—how to find food and water in the arid 
wilderness ; how to make a fire and cook; how to read 
the weather signs ; how to select curative herbs in case of 
sickness; and all the innumerable small bits of experi- 
mental knowledge that give ease to journeying and comfort 
to the camp at night. It meant developing sight and hearing 


124 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


to an abnormal acuteness. And it meant fearlessness in 
solitude ; long days of lonely communion with the great 
powers of nature and their invisible Creator ; a sense of the 
awfulness of God; a sense of destiny and providence. 

It was these years of desert discipline which made Moses 
so intrepid and dexterous a leader of the great herd of city 
slaves whom he led out into the wilderness. ‘“[hey were 
instantly at a loss, terrified, helpless, ready to run back 
again into slavery. But this unrivalled scoutmaster, 
with prodigious energy and resource, will never be beaten. 
He not only finds them food and drink and pasturage, but 
organizes them into an army, establishes a common law 
and a tribal constitution, gives them a religion, and leaves 
them at last ready victoriously to enter the lost home of their 
forefathers—that hill-country beyond the northern horizon, 
which to the meagrely fed inhabitants of Arabia has always 
been, and still is, spoken of as ‘‘ the good land of the north, 
where is milk enough,” a land flowing, as old Israel said, 
with milk and honey. 

This Moses, then, was soon the right-hand man of his 
father-in-law, Jethro. And ‘“‘as he kept the flock of 
Jethro, he led it to the back of the desert, and came to the 
mountain of God, even to Horeb.”” And somewhere amid 
those barren and savage mountains the lonely shepherd, 
like Mohammed in his mountain cave near Mecca two 
thousand years later, had a vision which completely altered 
his career, and drew him out from his obscure solitude to 
be one of the half-dozen or so great founders of religion 
on this earth. ‘The angel of the Lord appeared unto him 
in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.”” We have to 
guess at the meaning underlying such an abrupt and con- 
densed narrative. Our worrying search after explanations 
could hardly have been understood by the ancient chroniclers 
to whom the mere mention of the name of God was ade- 
quate reason for any astonishing incident in a world so full 
of recurrent marvel as this. No novel prodigy could greatly 


THE BURNING BUSH 125 


surprise men who lived with such a profound feeling of 
supernatural powers at work about them as the Arab or 
the Israelite. “I’o seek to understand the mystery would 
be blasphemy, an insolent questioning of the Almighty. 
But our modern attitude compels questioning. We believe 
God wants us to find out the laws of His working in this 
world. He provokes our mental inquiry. Our passionate 
search for explanations, our eagerness to put mysterious 
incidents into some known category, and to trace effects 
back to known causes, are, we fully believe, due to that 
very spirit of God Himself in man, which is a spirit of 
knowledge, wisdom and understanding as well as of 
reverence and holy fear. 

A bush that burnt and yet was not consumed: was it 
simply the senna bush in its season of yellow blossoming 
which suddenly struck the imagination of Moses as a holy 
and adorable thing, and made him fling off his sandals as 
if he were entering a sacred place? Just as Linnzus 
the botanist, wandering on Wimbledon Common when the 
gorse had broken out in all its golden splendour, dropped 
on his knees, as the story goes, to praise God for such a 
great glory. Oras Richard Wilson, the first of our English 
landscape painters, stood speechless before a waterfall in 
Italy, until at last he burst out in admiration, “ Well done, 
waterfall, by God!” It is indeed by God that such superb 
scenes are wrought for us. And probably we have all 
had our ecstatic moments when we have felt the impulse 
to take off our hats to a sunset, or a bank of daffodils, or a 
west-country apple-orchard in May. This is the sentiment 
of Mrs, Browning’s often quoted lines : 

Earth’s crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God ; 


But only he who sees, takes off his shoes— 
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. 


But this purely poetic explanation of the matter is probably 
quite inadequate to account for the momentous results of 


126 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


this incident and the way in which it stands out in the narra- 
tives of after-times as a thing uniquely astonishing. “There 
is, apparently, an actual bush known to botanists, the dic- 
tamnus fraxinella, which, through some peculiar property 
it possesses, can catch fire without any damage being done 
to its leaves ; but it does not belong to Arabia. Robertson 
Smith, in his Religion of the Semites, maintained that the 
explanation of the burning bush must lie in some electrical 
phenomenon occurring in the clear dry air of the desert 
or of lofty mountains. ‘There ts little doubt that electrical 
phenomena, from the frequent lightning flash in heaven 
to rarer and more bizarre appearances, must, in their utter 
inexplicableness in the ancient world, have stood out as 
among the most evident signs of the presence and power 
of mysterious Deity. We know how electrical fires will 
appear to play around a tree or some projecting object. 
And Robertson Smith quotes one or two parallels to this 
Mosaic story. It was believed, for instance, “that fire 
played about the branches of the sacred olive-tree between 
the Ambrosian rocks at Tyre without scorching its leaves.” 
And the same phenomenon was seen at the terebinth at 
Mamre. While “at Aphaca, at the annual feast, the 
goddess appeared in the form of a fiery meteor, which 
descended from the mountain-top and plunged into the 
water, or, according to another account, fire played about 
the temple, presumably in the tree-tops of the sacred grove.” 
There, then, in some electrical phenomenon akin to St. 
Elmo’s fire and, possibly, to our will-o’-the-wisp, lies, in 
all probability, the explanation of the physical miracle which 
so profoundly impressed Moses. ‘This amazing vision 
coming “o him in the desolate solitude of Horeb startled 
him to a vivid sense of the Divine Presence. This thing 
was an angel of the Lord to him. As he drew near it he 
felt compelled as by an authoritative voice to treat the spot 
as a sanctuary, and, with the customary gesture of eastern 
reverence, he loosed his sandals and stole forward bare- 


THE BURNING BUSH 129 


footed to see this wondrous sight, why the bush was 
not burnt. 
_ The vision came to a heart prepared for a great call of 
duty. In his lonely meditative life in the wilds the thoughts 
of Moses must often have turned back to the dismal en- 
slavement of his fellow-countrymen in Egypt. And 
now another Pharaoh sat upon the throne. It might be 
tolerably safe for Moses to return. Could he not do some- 
thing to liberate his people? It was worth the risk of 
trying. Why should he be living in this freedom and 
quietness in Arabia while his fellows toiled under the ghastly 
lash of the task-masters, and crept broken and wearied 
to their squalid huts about Memphis at the end of the day? 
Such reflections must often have haunted him. And now 
that he was face to face with the presence of God in the 
bush, the sense of the divine summons could only take 
one form for him. ‘This awful Godhead so mysteriously 
evidenced to him in his loneliness was surely claiming his 
service. “[his God who ruled the sunrise and the desert 
winds and all the magic of nature was He, too, who governed 
the destiny of men. And He was righteous. It was not 
His will that men should be enslaved to wrong. But He 
needed servants to carry out His purposes, even as He made 
use of the mountain-thorn to reveal His Presence. And 
then the Divine Voice rang out unmistakably in Moses’s 
conscience : God had chosen him and was looking to him 
to act as the deliverer of Israel. “That was the meaning 
of the holy fire that burnt miraculously in front of him, 
It was a trumpet-call to a tremendous task. Suddenly and 
quite clearly he realizes what must often have haunted him 
as a passing suggestion in his mind—that he is no longer 
to tarry in Midian. His people were losing their souls 
under that grinding tyranny yonder. ‘Their sense for 
fatherland, their religion, were almost gone. ‘They were 
so many beasts of burden, that was all—waking each morning 
to a sick monotony of agony and sweat. And here was he, 


128 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


their natura! leader, with all his advantages of education 
and Court influence, living free and safe amid the infinite 
quietude and austere beauty of the desert. “The winds of 
these wide upland spaces, the infinite breadth of the heavens 
overhead, the purple splendour of the rocks and the intense 
blue of the far-off sea, were all preaching to him of duty. 
How dare he feed his soul on God’s splendour while his 
poor compatriots were writhing under tyrannous toil? 
Was he a coward after all? ‘There stood the thorn ablaze 
with magical light—God’s angel. God was calling him. 
Ali the doubts and excuses which came crowding to his 
mind slunk off again ashamed. ‘There was only one thing 
to be done. He must return to Egypt and deliver his 
people from their yoke. ‘The fact of that wondrous bush 
and the fact of slavery were incompatible. God’s glory in the 
bush was an awful protest against any human lives being 
forced into unloveliness and terror and woe. It must 
not be. His mission was laid upon him. He had seen 
God face to face in order that he might become the saviour 
of his people. “Thenceforward he had a vocation. 


O world, as God has made it! all is beauty: 
And knowing this, is love, and love is duty. 


Behind the greatest human careers there must always 
lie some such moment of supreme consecration. It was 
so with Isaiah in the temple, with his vision of the six- 
winged seraphim chanting their ‘Trisagion about the feet 
of God. It was so with Paul on the Damascus road. It 
was so, to quote a humbler case, with the young Words- 
worth, when, after a night of dancing and merriment in a 
Cumberland village, he made his way home over the hills 


at dawn : 
Magnificent 
The morning rose, in memorable pomp, 
Glorious as e’er I had beheld—in front, 
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near, 
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, 
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light ; 


THE BURNING BUSH 129 


And in the meadows and the lower grounds 
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn— 
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds, 

And labourers going forth to till the fields. 

Ah! need I say, dear Friend! that to the brim 
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows 
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me 
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
A dedicated Spirit. 


‘These moments of impassioned insight come to all of us 
in our measure. Happy he who, looking back across the 
years, can say with Paul, “‘I was not disobedient to the 
heavenly vision.” 

The great lesson of the burning bush is that to see God 
means always to be challenged and thrust forward into 
service. Rightly to adore God’s glory means that we will 
tolerate no defacement of His creation; that we will 
consider it worth while to fight to a finish in order to secure 
for every one a share in beauty and freedom. It means that 
we shall be revolutionists on behalf of justice. When we 
have been luxuriating in a delightful holiday season amid 
hills and waterfalls, amid orchards and scented hedgerows, 
has not the burden of the toiling multitudes in some city 
slum come back upon us, until we have felt that it was not 
fair for us to be there, unless out of all that enrichment 
we were winning for ourselves, we went back full of eager- 
ness to lend a hand toward the liberation and upliftment of 
mankind? ‘That was exactly the sentiment of Coleridge 
on leaving his cottage at Clevedon ; and he has given a 
permanent expression to it in English poetry in his Reflections 
on Having Left a Place of Retirement : 


Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime! 
I was constrained to quit you. Was it right, 
While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled, 
That I should dream away the entrusted hours 
On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart 
With feelings all too delicate for use? 

Sweet is the tear that from some Howard’s eye 
Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earth 


9 


130 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


And he that works me good with unmoved face 
Does it but half: he chills me while he aids 

My benefactor, not my brother man! 

Yet even this, this cold beneficence 

Praise, praise it, O my Soul! oft as thou scann’st 
The sluggard Pity’s vision-weaving tribe ! 

Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched, 
Nursing in some delicious solitude 

Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies ! 

I therefore go, and join head, heart and hand, 
Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight 

Of science, freedom and the truth in Christ. 


All generous hearts will inwardly echo that nobly 
expressed resolve. We have no right to enjoy heaven while 
our fellows groan in hell. We have got rid indeed of 
chattel slavery from the world. Yet how accursedly 
cramped and impoverished, illiterate and enfeebled are the 
lives of the majority of mankind even now! Let those of 
us whose lives have been nurtured in comfort and lovelinesss ; 
who can afford to furnish our homes richly, and dress our 
children sweetly, and go travelling amid the finest scenes 
that earth can show ; let all of us to whom in any measure 
these great privileges belong think of the dull, penurious 
lives of those whose surroundings make even bare cleanliness 
possible only by the most extravagantly arduous toil ; who 
never have nice things about them—no lovely ornaments, 
or choice books, or pleasant gardens, or delicately served 
meals—nothing but the long round of dull labour, with 
squalid rooms and underfeeding ; who see their children 
coarsening before their very eyes through lack of leisured 
attention and guardianship ; who have no little hoard laid 
by to tide them through a bad season or a spell of sickness ; 
and to whom a cheerless funeral through the sordid streets 
comes all too soon, and yet as a welcome relief. ‘That such 
lives should be lived by men and women in a world where 
the miracles of God’s glory are so plentiful and so dazzling ! 
God calls us to straighten out the sorry tangle. “The whole 
universe protests against our ugliness and unhappiness. 


THE BURNING BUSH 131 


Every tree with its miracles of rising sap and leaf and blos- 
som ; every stone with its miracles of crystal ; every wave 
of the sea, and every glance of sunshine; every human 
body in its glory of shape and mechanism—all shout to 
us to arrange our human relationships conformably to the 
wealth and dignity of God’s world. It is an insult to the 
sunlight that such lives should be lived, an outrage in 
the face of the moon. ‘Therefore to those who have power 
and health and culture the incessant call comes to rescue 
humanity out of the slavery of this Egyptian darkness. 
An Exodus is possible. God wills it. And He summons 
us, like Moses, to turn back to the servitude where our 
brethren are, that we may herald among them the dawn 
of the life of the age to come, and open up the passage to 
the Land of Promise. 








He rebuked the Red Sea also, and it was dried up: 
So He led them through the depths, as through the wilderness. 
And He saved them from the hand of him that hated them, 
And redeemed them from the hand of the enemy. 
And the waters covered their enemies : 
There was not one of them left. 

PSALM CVi. 9-II. 


For the Lord your God dried up the waters of Jordan from before 
you, until ye were passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red 
Sea, which He dried up before us, until we were gone over: that all 
the people of the earth might know the hand of the Lord, that it is 
mighty: that ye might fear the Lord your God for ever. 

JOSHUA iv. 23, 24. 


X 


A HIGHWAY THROUGH THE SEA 


E English folk can look back to one or two great 

moments of national salvation. “The one which 
has impressed itself on our memory most of all is, perhaps, 
the defeat of the Spanish Armada. A new life began for 
England from that moment. Our country stepped forward 
to world-leadership in adventurous exploration and colonial 
expansion, and in political liberty, and in literature. Our 
peculiar English gifts in poetry, adventure and statesman- 
ship burst into flower under the impulse of that great 
deliverance. “The memory of such an episode feeds the 
spirit of a nation perpetually. 

Now the Jews could look back upon two most dramatic 
deliverances. ‘Twice over the whole nation was enslaved 
to a foreign Power ; twice over the nation was delivered. 
But whereas the latter escape from Babylon was a relatively 
tame affair, due to the magnanimity of Cyrus rather than 
to the heroism of any national leader, the earlier escape 
from Egypt was brought about by a thrilling effort of national 
hardihood and perseverance, carried through against enormous 
odds and crowned with magnificent success. No wonder 
that the Exodus stood out in Jewish memory as the supreme 
incident in their history, the dominating example of God’s 
providence toward Israel. And no wonder that the 
national imagination, brooding from age to age over this 
superb and prodigious story, should have worked every 
detail of it to a pitch of extravagant supernaturalism. ‘This 
is the story of a proud people’s rebirth from uttermost 


ignominious slavery into freedom, conquest and empire. 
135 


136 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


There is, perhaps, no other episode in history that can 
quite parallel this in dramatic excitement and startling 
contrast. No wonder it was told in terms of supernatural 
prodigy. 

It was amazing, in the first place, that the heroic leader 
Moses should have been able, by any bold defiance or 
diplomatic dexterity, to overcome the obstinate despotism 
of the Pharaoh. The thing seemed incredible without 
divine aid. Doubtless there was divine aid. And the 
Jewish historians expressed their conviction of this divine 
aid in the story of the plagues. 

It is, perhaps, worth while giving a moment’s reflection 
to these strange legends of how the wrath of God was poured 
upon the haughty imperialism of Egypt. | 

There are usually reckoned to be ten plagues. But this 
enumeration arises out of the fact that there are three 
separate accounts interwoven in the Book of Exodus, which 
really overlap each other. ‘The plague of flies in one 
account parallels the plague of lice in another ; the murrain 
of one account is the same as the plague of boils in another. 
So that a careful scrutiny reduces the ten plagues to eight 
or perhaps seven. And they are all of them plagues or 
disastrous happenings to which Egypt is recurrently liable, 
just as in England we are recurrently liable to floods and 
gales and various epidemic diseases. 

The first is the turning of the Nile water into blood. 
The nucleus of fact in this story is well known to be the 
annual discoloration of the Nile during the summer months, 
when, owing to the amount of decaying vegetable matter 
brought down in solution, the river water turns to a dull 
red colour and smells badly. In some years this discolora- 
tion is much more pronounced than in others, and causes 
real hardship through the impurity of the water. 

When the water recedes from its flood-levels, and leaves 
stagnant pools everywhere about, a veritable plague of 
frogs, which spawn in these pools, may very likely follow. 


A HIGHWAY THROUGH THE SEA 137 


Indeed, there have been recorded showers of mingled mud 
and tadpoles, when a violent wind has swept the naked 
mud-banks. A modern instance of this very curious 
phenomenon was recorded in the newspapers as recently as 
the year 1915 in a Reuter telegram from Gibraltar, which 
declared that during a thunderstorm at that place in the 
month of May a cloud belched forth millions of tiny frogs 
which had, it was supposed, been sucked up from a lake 
twenty miles distant. ‘The ground about Gibraltar was 
said to be positively swarming with them. 

In similar circumstances sand-flies or lice abound on the 
drying mud-banks, and become a very troublesome pest. 
Locusts are rare in Egypt, but occasionally they do sweep 
over from the Arabian desert on an east wind with their 
well-known destructiveness. Hail, too, is of quite rare 
occurrence ; but when it does come it is In a very severe 
form, with stones heavy enough to be really dangerous. 

The plague of darkness probably refers to a sandstorm. 
These storms, brought up by spring winds from the south- 
west, blacken the sky worse than a London fog; it is 
impossible to get shelter from them ; the sand chokes eyes 
and ears and throat; people may even perish through 
suffocation. “They are indeed a darkness which may be 
felt. And they are usually reckoned to last about three 
days—the time allotted to the plague of darkness. Finally, 
such a sandstorm irritates the skin, and Is frequently followed 
by a murrain among the beasts. 

And thus in the record of the plagues of Egypt we have 
reference to all the chief evils which afflict that land, and 
which to a large extent produce each other in a regular 
sequence of cause and effect. It is just as if a writer were 
to put down in succession all the possible misfortunes of a 
twelvemonth in England as being God’s reiterated scourge 
to discipline us : heavy snows in December, with the loss 
of sheep on the moors—which snows, melting under a 
warmer wind, bring floods, and give us a whole nation 


138 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


with a cold in the head; then follow spring hurricanes, 
with wrecks upon the coast, old trees uprooted, buildings 
blown down ; and later, in the summer, comes drought and 
a spread of cholera ; and finally the crash of thunderstorms. 
So one upon another fall the plagues of Egypt. It was not 
impossible for them all to follow each other within a period 
of a few months, as the story of Exodus indicates. And a 
specially unfortunate year such as that would be would 
no doubt make even Pharaoh a little thoughtful, a little 
timid in his conscience, and inclined to listen the more 
readily to any suggestion as to a new course of conduct 
which might be expected to avert these evident signs of the 
wrath of heaven. 

The only one of the plagues which is really puzzling 
is the destruction of the first-born. One may suppose 
that it refers to the universal mourning brought about by 
one or other of the civil wars which are known to have taken 
place in Egypt about this period, though such an explanation 
hardly gives the key to why it is that the story singles out 
only the eldest son in each family as being the victim of 
the angel of death. But any fuller explanation seems to 
be lacking. 

These uncanny stories of the Egyptian plagues are all 
seen, then, to rest upon quite natural phenomena, though 
they are written up into an elaborately supernaturalistic 
shape. What it all amounts to is that Moses was astute 
enough to make use of a run of exceptionally bad luck 
which came to Egypt during the time of his agitation on 
behalf of the Hebrew slaves : he uses it to work on Pharaoh’s 
fears. It was Pharaoh’s tyranny, he would urge, which 
was bearing this evil fruit and bringing God’s curse on 
the land. And at last the old tyrant is really moved by 
superstitious dread, and in desperation decides to let Moses 
have his way. | 

And so the ever memorable journey begins. A huge 
caravan of ignorant, timid, helpless folk, with wives and 


4 HIGHWAY THROUGH THE SEA 139 


children and chattels, struggles out by night towards the 
frontier. By the time they reach the line of the Suez 
Canal they hear that Pharaoh has repented of his weakness 
and is after them with his warriors to intercept their flight. 
What a scene of consternation for Moses to face! They , 
are just at the head of the Red Sea, between it and the salt 
lakes which fill a large part of the isthmus. ‘The ground 
is all low-lying and marshy ; and apparently in ancient 
times, when the sea extended considerably farther north 
than it does now, an exceptionally high tide would flood 
through the marshes and join the waters of the ocean with 
the waters of the Bitter Lakes. At low tide there would 
be a wide stretch of shore at the north end of the Red Sea 
which might give firm enough travelling. Beside this shore 
the Israelites were encamped when the news of the pursuit 
reached them. Here they were penned in like Horatius 
on the broken bridge—the broad flood one way and a great 
host of enemies the other. It was useless for these poor 
slaves to put up a fight against the troops of Pharaoh. ‘heir 
only hope was to get round the sea to the wilderness beyond. 
Would the tide ebb in time for them to get across? One 
can imagine how anxiously they waited. 

Then the ebb begins. As they watch it impatience and 
anxiety increase. At last the order is given to advance over 
the still wet sands, and the great frightened mob bundles 
itself across in frantic haste. It was a distance, maybe, of 
several miles; the journey would take them some hours ; 
and before they reached the farther side the tide already would 
be turning. Meanwhile the Egyptian army, with its heavy 
lumbering chariots, essayed the same crossing. But it 
was poor going for all their heavy gear. They stick in the 
wet mud and precious time is wasted. And when the dawn 
comes up, and the Israelites look back from safety on the 
farther shore, Pharaoh and his army are struggling to dis- 
entangle themselves from the jeopardy of the rising tide. 
Itistoolate, They are right in the midst of the crossing ; it 


140 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


is no easier to turn back than to go forward ; numbers of 
them are bogged and drowned, and the whole terrifying 
pursuit is shattered. 

So came the great deliverence. So God made for Israel 
a highway through the sea. No doubt the triumphant 
escape owed much to the quick-witted strategy of Moses ; 
but the Israelties could not fail to ascribe the hand of God 
to it. It was His Providence which had set them free. 

Anyone who knows the ebb and flow in an estuary 
such as the Solway or the sands of Dee, will understand 
the truth of this tale. It is so easy in such places to be 
overtaken by the tide which runs up with imperceptible 
swiftness. In the channel between Holy Island and the 
Northumberland coast, which is dry enough to walk across 
at low tide, 1t has been found necessary to erect shelters on 
tall scaffoldings for unwary travellers to escape into if the 
inflow should overtake them far from shore—experience 
having taught folk how easily such an accident may 
happen. 

In the earliest documents of Exodus the natural character 
of this incident is clearly indicated. We are told that a 
strong east wind blew back the sea and caused a specially 
low tide. But the later Priestly Narrative talks of a path 
through the sea itself with a stupendous wall of water on 
either hand. So does legend grow in the pious imagina- 
tions of men. It is interesting to know that the story 
in the earlier documents is, so far, confirmed by a modern 
witness, Major-General Tulloch, who has recorded an 
instance which he himself observed, when, under a strong 
east wind, the waters of Lake Menzaleh at the entrance to 
the Suez Canal receded for a distance of seven miles. And 
there are other historical parallels to this passage of the Red 
Sea, such as the story reproduced in Hasting’s Bible Dic- 
tionary of the Russian army which entered the Crimea in 
1738 by a passage made for them by the wind through the 
shallow waters of the Putrid Sea—the north-western gulf 


A HIGHWAY THROUGH THE SEA 141 


of the Sea of Azov. Most famous among such parallel 
stories, however, is that of the passage of Alexander along 
the coast of Lycia where the mountains descend almost 
sheer into the sea. A narrow roadway here was passable at 
certain tides, but with a south wind blowing the road was 
covered witha greatdepth of water. As Alexander approached 
the spot, the wind had been blowing strongly from the south, 
but, by the special providence of the gods as he declared, 
in the nick of time the wind changed to north, and the sea 
receded sufficiently for his troops to made headway, although 
they had the water up to their waists. 

Finally, we may note the reproduction of the idea of a 
miraculous crossing of water in Jewish history itself, in the 
case of Joshua leading the tribes over Jordan ; and in that 
of Elijah crossing the same river dryshod after striking the 
waters with his mantle, just as the Priestly Narrative had 
_ represented the stretched-out arm of Moses as the instrument 
by which the Red Sea had been made to open a path to 
Israel. But in these instances there probably lies behind 
the story nothing but the choice of a natural ford; though 
there is evidence of the waters of Jordan having been tem- 
porarily held up by landslides more than once, and it has 
been suggested as possible that Joshua may have taken 
advantage of such an occurrence, which would, indeed, 
make the passage of Jordan peculiarly memorable, and to 
the ancient mind as clearly an evidence of supernatural 
aid as the crossing of the Red Sea itself. 

There is a memorable incident in the life of Santa Teresa, 
when, as an old woman of sixty-seven and half paralysed, 
she came on her journeying, with a group of her nuns, 
to a flooded river. The pontoon bridge was half a yard 
deep under water; but that did not hinder Teresa. 
‘““Now then, my daughters,” she said, “hinder me not ; 
for it is my desire to cross first, and, if I am drowned, I 
beseech you earnestly not to attempt it, but to return home.” 
So saying, the valiant old woman plunged into the swirling 


142 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


water and won through to the opposite bank, her whole 
party following her safely. It would have taken but little 
writing up of such an incident to turn it into sheer miracle ; 
for the basis of miracle is there—the marvellous power of a 
courage inspired by faith to overcome apparently insuperable 
obstacles. And such a story, repeating on a small scale 
the prowess of Moses at the Red Sea, helps us to understand 
where the miracle of the Exodus really lay—not in a physical 
but in a spiritual prodigy. 

This astonishing Crossing of the Sea stood out, then, in 
the memory of Israel as an unforgettable portent. It was 
the crisis of their deliverance. At one stroke they were 
free. Egypt was a nightmare from which they had sud- 
denly awaked. Adventure and liberty lay ahead of them. 
Between their past and their future was a great gulf fixed. 
Never could they tire of celebrating that supreme moment 
when God had made for them a highway through the 
waters. It is the constant theme of their poets in after 
time. “God,” they sing exultantly, ‘‘did divide the sea 
by His strength, and broke the heads of the dragons in 
the waters; He made the waters tostandasan heap. With 
the blast of His nostrils the waters were gathered together, 
and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.” 
And thus a very strong faith grew up in Israel that God’s 
providence could always lead them thraugh their difficulties, 
that in every hour of disaster He would provide a way of 
escape. Their God was the God of the Exodus—their 
Deliverer. 

We need that conviction of God as the great Liberator. 
And the Old Testament stories which symbolize such faith 
are therefore precious to us still, albeit our ideas as to the 
modes of God’s emancipating action may not be identical 
with the notions of old Hebrew theology. The note of 
deliverance rings out in the A/agnificat as triumphantly 
as in the Song of Miriam. God is that power which exalts 
the enslaved and the oppressed. The Old Testament knew 


4A HIGHWAY THROUGH THE SEA _ 143 


that power to be the Spirit of Righteousness. ‘There lay 
the moral superiority of the Hebrew conception of deity 
over any other in the ancient world. Yahweh was the 
God of Righteousness, the Spirit who appealed to a man 
through his conscience. He was the true God, and there 
was none other worshipful beside Him. ‘The Divine 
Power manifested in the operations of nature, in the corn- 
field and the vineyard and the sea, may indeed be worshipful 
in degree, as the religion of ancient Greece endeavoured to 
show. But the concepts of God thus arrived at do not 
reach fundamental truth. ‘They are not redeeming, eman- 
Cipating concepts, as Greek philosophy itself soon found. 
It is God known as a moral power, the Spirit of Righteous- 
ness, who alone can deliver mankind from evil oppression. 
The Old Testament belief in God had, therefore, essential 
and permanent truth in it. Yahweh is often represented 
immorally as judged by our modern standards; but, in 
spite of this, the distinctive quality of the religion of Israel 
was that it saw God as, fundamentally, the power which 
uttered itself in man’s conscience. And that was an un- 
shakeable foundation for faith, “The New Testament did 
but glorify this old concept of God’s righteousness by showing 
that righteousness, in the last resort, spells love. The 
Spirit of holy love incarnate in Christ—there is the final 
revelation of the true God, the only saviour and emanci- 
pator of mankind. It was this God, this Holy Spirit 
working through Moses, who verily delivered Israel 
out of Egypt. It is this God who has brought about every 
mighty deliverance of nations and individuals from enslave~ 
ment, whether to the tyranny of others or to the bondage 
of their own sin. It is He who through Mazzini delivered 
Italy into nationhood. It is He who through Lincoln 
emancipated the American negroes. It is He before 
whom all tyrannous Czardoms totter to destruction. For 
“He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath 
exalted the humble and meek.”” ‘This God of Righteousness 


144 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


and Love who alone is our Redeemer—ah ! if only the 
nations really believed in Him ! 

But we do not effectively believe in Him. After all 
the discipline of the ages we are still ready to believe in 
almost anything rather than good-will as the instrument 
of our safety and freedom and happiness. We still half 
believe that it is our own lusts or our own coercive self- 
assertion that will secure these things for us. And so 
we linger in the Egyptian darkness of political misrule, of 
social arrogance, and of individual malice—and the Promised 
Land remains far off across a gulf we shall never bridge 
until the true God guides us. Yet God’s offer of liberty 
holds good for ever. ‘The liberty of personal forgiveness, 
of absolution from a bad past, is received by those who answer 
the call of this true God: the fact of redemption is as 
obvious as the fact of sin. And the liberty of social fellow- 
ship is likewise received by those nations who answer the 
call of this true God : the fact of social redemption through 
obedience to God’s law of justice is as obvious as that of 
social ruin by the indulgence of injustice. “There is for 
individuals and for nations one infallible way of escape, and 
one only. There is one God alone, by worshipping whom 
we can be set free. He is the God of Moses and Isaiah, 
whose Name is Righteousness; the God of Paul and of 
Francis, whose Name is Love. And thou shalt have no 
other gods before Him. 

Israel was constantly saved by hope, because, in its far 
past, it had won from experience a rooted conviction that 
there was a Divine Power which could provide a way of 
escape from circumstances of uttermost despair. ‘This 
conviction rallied the hearts of Israel’s prophets again 
and again in periods of disaster. There was no evil 
which a loyal trust in the good God could not ultimately 
overcome. It is not an easy belief. Men are often other- 
wise persuaded. We are all tempted to fall into a 
faithless and cynical attitude which declares that evil is 


A HIGHWAY THROUGH THE SEA 145 


bound to triumph, that the good is too difficult to ac- 
complish ; that dreams of universal justice are Utopian; 
that you cannot do much to alter things for the better ; 
that poverty and misery and vice and war are inherent 
in this world’s life and can never be banished from it. ° 
And the supreme value of the Bible-is that it gives a counter- 
blast to all this cowardly cynicism, and preaches to us a 
Way of Escape by the hand of a God of Deliverance. Sin 
abounds on earth appallingly—all manner of oppressive 
wrong harasses and tortures human life. But there is a 
grace which much more abounds, shining out from every 
heroic and saintly exploit ever wrought on earth—the power 
of a Holy Spirit in man’s heart, a spirit of integrity, courage 
and love which is victoriously valiant against evil, and which 
for ever will be sovran over every wrong if we follow its 
guidance obediently. With God all things are possible. 
You may imprison and crucify the Christ, but death cannot 
hold Him: after three days He shall rise again. You 
may maim and lacerate a whole people till their material 
resources are clean gone, but so long as a spark of faith 
is left among them you cannot quench the Holy Spirit 
in their midst, and they will revive and find their place 
on God’s earth still. You may tempt the human soul 
and drag it down into a hell of woe and shame, but you 
can never so disfigure it that it loses its heavenly imprint 
and becomes finally unsalvable. ‘The ultimate victory in 
this universe lies with the God who is righteousness and 
love. He is the God of our escape, of our salvation. Love 
never faileth 

For those who really believe in and worship this saving 
God there is always a highway through the sea of trouble. 
And it is the folk possessed of such faith who all down the 
ages have lifted mankind out of its chains and led it toward 
the Land of Promise. ‘They have been such as Browning 
sings of, who ‘“‘never doubted clouds would break, never 
dreamed tho’ right were worsted, wrong would triumph ; 

Te) 


146 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.” 
Under their heroic leadership our timorous, distrustful, 
fainting humanity is still led onward, saved by the hope 
that we shall yet see the goodness ef God in the land of 
the living. 


BS 


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AND FIRE . 


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CLOUD 





And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead 
them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light ; 
to go by day and by night: He took not away the pillar of the cloud 
by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people. 

ExoODUS Xili. 21, 22. 


And the angel of God which went before the camp of Israel, removed 
and went behind them ; and the pillar of the cloud went from before 
their face, and stood behind them: and it came between the carp of 
the Egyptians and the camp of Israel, so that the one came not near 


the other all the night. 
EXODUS xiv. 19, 20. 


XI 
THE PILLAR OF CLOUD AND FIRE 


LEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, in writing to a 

circle of Greek readers about Moses as a military 
leader, tries to persuade them as to the truth of various 
features in the narrative of the Exodus by pointing out 
parallels from their own Greek history. He reminds 
them of how, when one of their generals, “Thrasybulus, 
was on a Certain occasion bringing back a body of exiles 
from Phylz, and was wishing to elude observation, he 
marched through a trackless region in which a pillar became 
his guide. “To Thrasybulus by night, the sky being 
moonless and stormy, a fire appeared leading the way, 
which, having conducted them safely, left them near Muny- 
chia. From such an instance, therefore, let our accounts 
become creditable to the Greeks, namely that it was possible 
for the omnipotent God to make the pillar of fire, which 
was their guide on the march, go before the Hebrews by 
night.” So we find this early Christian exponent of 
Scripture pointing out that the story of the pillar of cloud 
and fire in Exodus does not stand alone, but has parallels 
in classical history. What is the explanation of such legends ? 
Almost certainly it is as follows : 

It is a habit with Arabian and Persian caravans when 
crossing a wilderness to carry at the head of the march 
braziers of burning wood raised on poles. ‘These serve 
as a guide to the direction of the march for the people in 
the rear of the caravan who otherwise, particularly at night, 


might lose touch with the folk ahead of them and miss their 
149 


150 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


way. For there is no road to guide them : they are cross- 
ing a trackless wilderness ; the caravan may straggle over 
a very long distance, and accidents may easily delay some 
parties until they are out of sight and hearing of the rest. 
Thus Doughty, in his Travels in Arabia Deserta, describes 
the beginning of a caravan march: “The night sky was 
dark and showery when we removed, and cressets of 
Iron cages set upon poles were borne to light the way, 
upon serving men’s shoulders, in all the companies.”’ 

When Alexander penetrated into Babylonia in the course 
of his eastern campaigns, he adopted the same practice for 
his army. Many miles might separate the rearguard 
from the vanguard, but always away on the horizon of 
the desert there could be seen the towering column of 
smoke from their braziers—a smoke which at night burnt 
lurid and flame-like, as does the smoke of a railway train 
This gave the needed signal of direction to the whole 
army. 

Smoke columns have been used for military signalling 
in warfare right up to the present day. And they have 
another possible use also. Just asin the Battle of Jutland one 
read of how the German destroyers got between their damaged 
battleships and the English ships, and belched out a cloud 
of black smoke in order to screen the German retreat ; or 
just as our own Navy made use of a similar dodge in the attack 
upon Zeebrugge, so in the desert in old times the braziers 
would on occasion be brought from the van to the rear, and, 
with the help of a suitable wind, would send up a screen 
of smoke between the army and any hostile pursuers, under 
shelter of which the course of the march might be defected, 
or preparations made for a defensive stand. ‘Thus the 
pillar of cloud was both a guide and a defence to any body 
of travellers through the waste. ‘lhe custom of carrying 
these braziers is still met with by modern travellers in 
Palestine and the neighbouring countries. So the fact 


underlying the legend in Exodus is hardly to be doubted. 


THE PILLAR OF CLOUD AND FIRE 151 


But the Israelites saw God in the cloud. ‘That is where 
the distinction of the story lies. There was nothing un- 
natural or prodigious about the fiery pillar : it was a thing 
in common use among the eastern nations. But the 
Israelites, with their peculiar spiritual sensitiveness, had | 
wonder enough to see God in it. In all that helped and 
protected them they perceived His invisible hand. Every 
blessing was to them a holy miracle of God’s special provi- 
dence. It was He who beset them behind and before. 
It was He whose presence dwelt in the sacred chest in the 
little tabernacle which was the rallying point for their 
caravan, and around which the great braziers were placed 
at every halt. When they saw the smoke-cloud they felt 
secure : they were protected by it, and all protection comes 
from the good God. Did He not dwell in the cloud, then? 

The marvel of the story does not lie in the material 
fact but in the spiritual handling of it. “The writers of our 
Book of Exodus, telling this story some hundreds of years 
later, may not themselves have understood the nucleus of 
fact underlying it. In its passage down the generations 
it had crystallized into miracle, and probably no natural 
explanation was sought for or dreamt of. ‘This does but 
emphasize the strong sense of the supernatural common 
in the ancient world. “The Greek mind was just as ready 
as the Hebrew to interpret any striking fact as evidence of 
a supernatural providence. For example, when Timoleon 
set out upon his famous expedition to the relief of Syracuse, 
he caused one special trireme, says Grote, to be fitted out 
in honour of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, that 
they might accompany him. And lo ! when the squadron 
struck out on a night voyage to the Italian coast, this sacred 
trireme was seen to be illuminated by a blaze of light from 
heaven ; while a burning torch on high ran along with 
the ship and guided the pilot to the proper landing-place. 
This was taken as a clear token of the presence of the god- 
desses; though one supposes it was not unusual for the 


152 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


admiral’s flagship to bear some special and striking light 
which would certainly “run along with the ship.” 

And such supernatural interpretations of fact have reli- 
gious truth in them even for our sophisticated minds. We 
may be perfectly sure-of the normality of the facts in a way 
in which the ancient Israelite or Greek, who recorded such 
stories, was not. And yet we may value that spiritual 
estimate of facts which made him turn the commonplace 
into the miraculous. For to wise men the commonplace 
is miraculous. “lo Peter Bell the primrose by the river’s 
brim is just a yellow primrose and nothing more. ‘To the 
poet it is an embodiment of the eternal beauty, a messenger 
of glad tidings, a symbol of God ; it is a miracle created 
by divine alchemy out of mere earth and air, a lasting source 
of astonishment and awe. It is the spiritual intuition of 
man which sees miracle in everyday fact, or more startlingly 
in abnormal fact. Once the miraculous interpretation has 
been established, the fact itself is apt to be transmuted into 
an impossible shape. But we can be grateful for the impos- 
sible shape it takes if thereby, albeit clumsily, man’s sense 
of astonishment at things, of a divine presence in things, 
‘something far more deeply interfused”’ in them than a 
flippant or unwondering glance can see, is preserved and 
quickened. 

And this is an outstanding merit in these Old Testament 
tales. Everything 1s regarded with eyes of holy wonder. 
Every striking incident of the long journeyings in the 
wilderness is taken to be an exhibition, one way or another, 
of the power of God. And so the story of the Forty Years 
has become a symbol of the life-pilgrimage of every man 3; 
not because it was in itself more marvellous than many 
redeeming passages in the history of other nations, but 
because of the reverent wonder that brooded over its every 
detail, and heightened every effect therein by a penetrating 
vision of the providence of God. 

We of later generations, as we make our pilgrimage 


THE PILLAR OF CLOUD AND FIRE 153 


across the wilderness of ignorance and sorrow, ever pursuing 
the dream of the promised country of happiness, and ever 
lured onward by faint glimpses of its borderland, look back 
to this ancient march of Israel, with its marvellous equip- 
ment of providential care, as a type of our own experience ; 
and we take encouragement from it to face our own dangers. 
The hand that led them is still present to guide us also into 
a fair land flowing with milk and honey. Now and again, 
when the clouds lift, we seem to see on the horizon the 
Delectable Mountains, and we know that we shall arrive. 
Men write their rapturous expectations of that country of 
desire in their Utopias and Apocalypses. “There ever- 
lasting spring abides and never-withering flowers.” But as 
yet we toil across the desert, often hungry and weary of 
heart, often in peril of battle and peril of storm ; and we 
should falter were it not that we felt God’s strong defence 
about us in the pillar of cloud and fire. In youth the 
pleasant country seems so near and easy toattain. Wemarvel 
indignantly that our predecessors have not quickened the 
pace and won their way home. We rush into the van 
shouting lustily to everybody to hurry up. And then as we 
struggle and toil to hasten the millenium we gradually feel 
the dead pull of the world’s inertia. It is so slow to move. 
Its steps wander so purposelessly. Heroes and prophets and 
martyrs suffer and labour for the race, but men still tarry 
in their foolish idolatries, worshipping their golden calves, 
selling their souls to mammon, until it sometimes seems as 
if mankind never could reach its true home. And then 
God in His grace sends some ray of light—a little child 
dancing, an act of splendid kindness, a word that flashes 
like the words of Jesus—and in that ray we catch a glimpse 
of the distant hills again, our souls’ home ; and we know 
that our present world is not our true world, but only a place 
of passage. “This world of wars and bickerings and falsehoods 
and lusts, of pain and hunger and loneliness—this is not 
what man is ultimately destined to. He belongs other 


cs) THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


where. ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions: I 
go to prepare a place for you.” We are meant to reach 
a country where love reigns, and joy and peace—where no 
one any longer experiences bewilderment and languor 
and unsatisfied longing, but where all work is pleasure 
and all life is praise, and God has wiped away all tears from 
men’s eyes. 


Ah! my sweet home Jerusalem 
Would God I were in thee! 


O happy harbour of the saints ! 
O sweet and pleasant soil! 

In thee no sorrow may be found, 
No grief, no care, no toil. 


There lust and lucre cannot dwell, 
There envy bears no sway ; 

There is no hunger, heat, nor cold, 
But pleasure every way. 


Thy gardens and thy gallant walks 
Continually are green, 

There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers 
As nowhere else are seen. 


Thy walls are made of precious stones, 
Thy bulwarks diamonds square, 

Thy gates are of right orient pearl, 
Exceeding rich and rare. 


Thy houses are of ivory, 

Thy windows crystal clear, 

Thy tiles are made of beaten gold— 
O God, that I were there ! 


So our longings shape themselves into lovely and solacing 
visions of the things to come, while we struggle forward, 
often disillusioned and often discouraged, but still saved 
by hope, for we believe that there is a wise Providence 
guiding all things to an issue in which we shall rest 
satisfied, 

And meanwhile there is the recognized pillar of the 


Divine Presence about us—that ineffable sense of protection 


THE PILLAR OF CLOUD AND FIRE 155 


and contentment which is the unfailing fruit of vital faith. 
Thus protected, martyrs have sung their way to the stake, 
and the leaders of many a seemingly lost cause have carried 
on unflinchingly, “ still nursing the unconquerable hope ”’ ; 
while humble people in the midst of tiresome and monoto- 
nous duties have been able to talk in the strain of Brother 
Lawrence: “ The time of business,’ said he, ‘‘ does not 
differ with me from the time of prayer ; and in the noise 
and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the 
same time calling for different things, I possess God in as 
great tranquillity as if I were on my knees at the blessed 
sacrament.’ Or, as Santa Teresa put it: ‘‘ God walks 
even amongst the pots and pipkins.”’ Vexations and weari- 
ness and perils are all passed through by such folk, as Jesus 
passed through the crowd that would have flung him over 
the cliff at Nazareth. Nothing daunts them, or disturbs 
their equanimity. “The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord 
is thy shade upon thy right hand.” “ Because thou hast 
made the Lord, the Most High, thy habitation, there shall 
no evil befall thee.” “In thee, O Lord, do I put my 
trust: be thou my strong habitation, whereunto I may 
continually resort.’ God’s presence is like a sheltering 
tent that surrounds these people as they move, and makes 
them immune from trouble. God’s Spirit within them is 
their perpetual defence, as Godiva’s chastity and pity were 
her screen and clothing the while she rode naked through 
the streets of Coventry. Innocence and uprightness are 
an unassailable armour in the midst of a dirty world ; and 
such qualities are the evidence of the Divine Presence . 
in man, ‘The pillar of cloud and fire is within our own 
souls. 

Yet not wholly so. Often it is some external aid which 
suggests the Presence—some symbol of fellowship, some 
social institution, some union in discipline. “These things 
hedge our weak wills about, and give us succour and safety. 
And in our Exodus story it is this aspect of God’s presence 


156 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


which is emphasized—His presence as focused in the 
symbols of Israel’s unity, in the cressets of fire which held 
the wandering caravan together and gave it a rallying point. » 
It was a sacramental presence, not one of individualistic 
inspiration. Israel found God in the emblems of communal 
life—in the national flag, so to speak ; for the pillar of 
cloud served as their standard. As Englishmen abroad in 
a time of danger will seek safety in some shelter where 
the Union Jack flies, so these Israelites felt safety in rallying 
to the fiery pillar. But it was the safety, not of mere 
patriotism but of churchmanship—not the safety of political 
power and prestige throwing its mantle over them, but 
the safety of a common religious faith which bound them 
to mutual defence and service. 

And if we are to draw out the true analogy in our own 
experience we must find our fiery pillar of the Divine 
Presence in the symbols of our Christian Churchmanship. 
It is the mystic fellowship of faith which is our guardian 
through life’s wilderness, and it is the Church’s sacraments 
which are the banner of our advance toward the far-off 
land of promise. It is in and through His Church that 
God safeguards us. What other safeguarding can there 
be in the arid and dangerous wilderness of our human sin 
and ignorance save the fellowship of a faith in the “love 
that rules the sun and all the stars”? Nothing can succour 
us but the comradeship which grows out of faith in God’s 
holiness and love. But that does succour us absolutely. 
In the comradeship of this faith the pilgrim band goes 
forward through the darkness, and the guiding light gleams 
clear before them. Without the conviction of God’s 
love there is nothing but a land of speculation ahead, and 
a land of strife and misery here and now. With it there 
Is present safety and a steady approach to a land of promise. 
For the whole and sole promise of any attainable blessedness 
for humanity lies in the fact that God really is love. If 
that is not true, then all hope of beatitude is a childish 


THE PILLAR OF CLOUD. AND FIRE’ 157 


make-believe, an ineffectual and perishing dream ; and all 
pictures of the Kingdom of Heaven are, indeed, mere news 
from nowhere. In a universe where the qualities of the 
Eternal Being were not holiness and love, it is conceivable 
that men might make for themselves pathetic little temporary 
oases of good-will in the desert of blind fate or mocking hate 
that surrounded them ; but the abiding city of our heart’s 
desire could never be reached. Nor could men, in their 
heroic effort to reach blessedness, feel that God was with 
them, and so reach the peace and contentment in their 
pilgrimage which the sense of His Presence brings. If 
God is not love, and if His blessed will is not surrounding 
us, the only sensible course is universal suicide. Unfaith 
reduces life to an absurdity. But men simply cannot 
acquiesce in the notion of a nonsensical universe. “They 
may stumble among doubts, but it is only the faith in God 
as an eternal will of holiness that really answers their ques- 
tionings and satisfies their longings. “The Church which 
maintains this faith is their ultimate refuge. Only in its 
fellowship will the true conviction of God and the vital 
sense of His presence be established for all men. Our 
fiery pillar in life’s wilderness is the lighted altar of the 
Christian Church—the symbol and rallying point of a 
comradeship of faith in a God of utter loving-kindness who 
is with His people in their afflictions, almighty to save. 
There the Angel of His Presence succours us. “There His 
people, “like cattle that go down into the valley,” are 
caused by His Spirit to rest in utter quietness. And so, 
leading His people, does He make Himself a glorious 
Name. 

Finding Him at this altar of our fellowship, and experi- 
encing the safety and sweetness of His indwelling, we can 
have no fear in the present and no doubt for the future. 
In His Name we put our trust. He is a Good Shepherd 
who leads us, whether by pleasant meads or by perilous 
gorges, to a feast of delight at the day’s end. And because 


158 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


of our realization of His surrounding providence, we have 
no grievous sense of exile even among the frets and dangers 
of our pilgrimage. It is God’s Home that we dwell in 
all the days of our life, and His goodness and mercy prevent 
and follow us. 


XII 


THE CORN OF HEAVEN 


He opened the doors of heaven, and rained down manna upo: 
to eat, — Race ; 9 ea j ed 
And gave them of the corn of heaven. Man did eat angel’ 


PsALM lxxyiil, 2 


” 


ae ay 8 ry 
bY gbiend ee ee 





XII 
THE CORN OF HEAVEN 


It is very nice to think 

The world is full of meat and drink, 
With little children saying grace 

In every Christian kind of place. 


TEVENSON had a pretty vision of a rich and thankful 
world. But the trouble with a well-fed world is 
that its meals are so regular and so adequate that they cease 
to be regarded with any surprise. Wonder and gratitude 
are not aroused. A world where the streets are lined with 
restaurants, and where men eat four hearty meals a day, 
is a world where the practice of saying grace before meat 
dies out. Eating and drinking lose their ceremoniousness, 
and the mystery of food is forgotten. In more impoverished 
conditions, where food is scarce and precarious, the para- 
mount blessing of it is forced upon every one’s consciousness, 
and the daily meal tends to become a festal ceremony, a 
proper occasion for thanksgiving. Men rejoice over their 
food and marvel at it. What a miracle it is, this sustenance 
and re-creation of life: bread and wine and milk turning 
into muscular machinery and nervous energy and bone and 
flesh, just as the elements of earth and air are transmuted 

into green leaves and coloured flower-petals | 
Picture a group of men spending a long winter in a snow- 
cave in the Antarctic, with nothing but seal-meat and bis- 
cuit to feed upon. What an incomparable treasure each 
day’s meagre ration becomes! What a chorus of thanks- 
giving at every little fresh discovery that varies their diet 
or improves its cooking—the first triumphant realization 

it 165 


162 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


of the value of seal-blubber, or the flavouring of seal’s 
brain mixed with the stew; or the making of lemonade 
out of acid taken from the medicine chest. In such 
adventurous circumstance almost the whole energy of life 
is concentrated on the problem of food, and every fresh bit 
of ingenuity in regard to it is as a God-given revelation 
commanding irrepressible applause. : 

Well! something of this mental outlook on the problem 
of food was Israel’s, as the people left Egyptian civilization 
behind them and plunged forward into the barren deserts 
of the Sinaitic peninsula. At first it seemed as if they 
were doomed to starve as soon as their own flocks and herds 
were consumed, and they very soon turned upon their 
leader and upbraided him for bringing them to die in the 
wilderness : ‘‘ Would to God we had died by the hand of 
the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh- 
pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have 
brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole 
assembly with hunger.” And then, we are told, said 
the Lord unto Moses: ‘“‘ Behold, I will rain bread from 
heaven for you.” And, indeed, Israel began to discover 
there in the desert altogether unexpected and inexplicable 
supplies of food that came like bread from heaven. When- 
ever the pinch of hunger and thirst was felt, some way was 
found to relieve it: water is struck from the very rock 
and bread falls down like dew. Hence to their amazement 
the Israelites found themselves alive month after month— 
alive and nourished in the midst of this parched wilderness ; 
and the poets of later times, when recounting the precious 
incidents of the Great Deliverance, were moved to declare 
how men ate angel’s food, how God provided His people 
with corn of heaven. 

The manna, at which the Israelites were so greatly 
astonished, is, as is well known to-day, a gum-like substance 
which exudes from several species of desert shrubs and 
trees and falls in flakes on the ground. A kind of manna 


THE CORN OF HEAVEN 163 


is still collected by the Arabs and sold to pilgrims. It is 
sometimes called oak-honey. But the usual manna grown 
in Mediterranean countries and sold in present-day markets 
comes from a species of ash. Manna is said to occur only 
in small quantities, and only during certain months of the 
year, and could never have formed the staple food of a whole 
tribe as it is represented as doing in the Book of Exodus, 
The manna obtainable in the Sinai region is a sugary sub- 
stance got from the tamarisk trees. It exudes from the 
branches when these are punctured by certain insects. 
It is not cooked, but is eaten with bread, like honey. A 
similar substance is got from the eucalyptus in Australia, 
and is there eaten as a sweetmeat by the children. 

The elaborate account of the way in which the manna 
was collected by the Israelites 1s therefore a romantic 
exaggeration of the actual facts. But it all grew out of the 
traditional wonder aroused by the discovery of this hitherto 
unknown and seemingly prodigious sort of food which 
came so providentially to replenish their meagre diet. Moses, 
who had lived for many years in this Sinaitic region working 
as a shepherd, knew all the desert lore and was doubtless 
the man who first put the people on to this new food supply. 
It was he, too, who, as a shepherd needing water for his 
flocks, had learnt to read the signs of the presence of water 
in places that seemed to the rest of the people utterly arid. 
Some sign of vegetation would show to his practised eye 
that there was moisture under the surface, and he would 
bid them dig, and lo! there lay the hidden spring. But 
his knowledge seemed to these poor city slaves from Egypt 
something altogether supernatural, It may very well have © 
happened that in his intercourse with the Bedawin shepherds 
he had picked up some trick such as the water-diviners of 
to-day use. ‘They take, we are told, a fresh ash sapling ; 
cut from it a prong like the frame of a catapult; and, holding 
the two points, walk over the ground until they are standing 
above hidden water, when the stem of the prong turns 


164 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


downwards by some curious magnetic attraction, and thus 
the presence of water is revealed. “This method, which its 
still used at times for the discovery of springs, may very 
well have been known to the ancients. Doughty tells us 
that some of the Arabian tribes “‘ in all else ignorant wretches, 
have inherited a land lore from sire to son, of the least 
finding-places of water.”” However, be the method what 
it might, Moses was regarded as a thorough enchanter and 
wizard by reason of the way in which he discovered water 
at opportune moments; and the way, too, in which he knew 
how to purify bitter water by throwing certain herbs into 
it. “Che people marvelled at their leader’s uncanny acuteness, 
As the historians were wont to say, he had but to strike 
a rock with his staff, so to speak, and out gushed the water 
from it. Indeed, amid their grumbling ignorance, this 
old mountain shepherd, Moses, stands out as a man of 
immense resourcefulness and indomitable energy—one of 
the real great ones of this earth. It needed an extraordinary 
captaincy to conduct this great herd of slave-folk, utterly 
unused to nomadic conditions, year after year, through this 
inhospitable district of Sinai, and keep them all fed. Yet 
Moses accomplished the task. By his resource and courage 
through the “forty years”? in the wilderness Israel fed 
upon ‘‘the corn of heaven.” 

What a lovely phrase that is! All the poetry of food 
in four words! Merely to say it over to oneself is like 
saying a grace. It arouses one to admiration at the per- 
petual miracle of food. It is like a Japanese poem—a single 
flash of insight expressed with the utmost verbal economy. 
The thing is said; and a vision of all the farm-lands and 
orchards and food-shops on earth rises before one as proof 
of man’s utter dependence on God’s bounty. We see all 
our bread as heaven’s gift. 

It is, indeed, heaven’s gift. Yet our enjoyment of it 
depends upon our human energy. Our Heavenly Father 
does not pamper His children, Still the ancient principle 


So SS oe 


THE CORN OF HEAVEN 165 


abides: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” 
For it is only God’s Spirit in man co-operating with God’s 
power in nature that brings increase of life and wealth 
and comfort. When we pray that God may give us our 
daily bread we are not to make our request as mere inactive 
recipients of a divine bounty—as mere lotos-eaters lying 
idle while the fruits of earth fall into our mouths. ‘The 
gift 1s conditional upon our co-operation with God, just 
as the gift of forgiveness is conditional upon our readiness 
to forgive others—that is, upon a disposition toward humility 
and self-examination. 

Now, there are two fundamental requisites in human 
society which condition the bounty of heaven toward us 
all: the first is work, the second is justice. Food can 
never be plenteous in a world of idlers ; it can never be 
evenly distributed in a world of gamblers. ‘The earth 
never fails us : when there is famine in Israel there is corn 
in Egypt. The earth yields enough. Its supplies are 
inexhaustible. But only by God’s energy in man, an 
energy of work and of brotherhood, can man be fed on 
this teeming earth. God answers our prayers through 
ourselves. God saves us through each other. When we 
pray to Him for food we are asking that a spirit of earnest 
industry and firm justice may be universally aroused in us 
to solve all the problems of hunger and nakedness and every 
bodily need of mankind. Our good-will in toil, our patient 
acquisition of new science, and our generous advance in 
comradeship, are the means of the fulfilment of our prayer. 
And these things are the working of God in us. An un- 
inspired society, as a simple matter of fact, does not get 
its daily bread, Man, selfish and unregenerate, may look 
after his own needs; though he will not do even this 
adequately, but only wastefully and short-sightedly. But 
he will certainly not look after the needs of others. It 1s 
only as man is moved by the Holy Spirit that he will make 
the common good his objective, that he will be anything 


166 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


else than a scrambling, wasteful, selfish beast. And so 
long as he is this, large sections of society will be half- 
starved whatever riches are availablé; nor will the 
available riches be. faintly approximate to the potential 
wealth of the earth. God’s Spirit in man is demon- 
strably the only ultimate source of bodily welfare and 
the mastery of nature. It is precisely because we are so 
certain that all food is God’s gift to us, the corn of heaven, 
that the Church makes a request for bread an integral 
part of its prayers—understanding that it is by prayer that 
the Divine Spirit enters into men, and that the Divine 
Spirit alone can successfully fight against hunger and desti- 
tution, and build up a society safeguarded in true wealth 
and health, with “joy in widest commonalty spread.” 
We do not pray for supernatural meals. But we know 
that all our meals are ultimately won for us by spiritual 
forces, won from God and by God. Israel was fed by 
God-given manna, but only through the instrumentality 
of the knowledge and resourcefulness of Moses, also God- 
given things. And all our food, however ordinary and 
unsurprising, is God-given in precisely similar ways, through 
the perennial marvel of earth’s fruitfulness and the still 
greater marvel of the spiritual endowments of mankind, 
slowly increasing as the ages pass, spreading more and more 
from outstanding individuals into the general social inheri- 
tance of wisdom and good-will. 

A few years ago, in one of our journals, there was an 
article written with admirable eloquence under the title 
“The Ravens that Feed England,’ which brings very 
vividly to one’s imagination the human labour upon which 
our food supplies depend. I will quote its central passage : 
‘‘Famine cannot strike us; we are insulated from the 
physical disasters of the globe; we read of blights and 
droughts in this country or that, famine and pestilence 
that bring millions to starvation; but nothing ever happens 
to us. When the crops that supply us fail in one part of 


Ba ” 


THE CORN OF HEAVEN 167 


.the world, what we need is always somehow obtained in 
another. We believe in our hearts that, whoever else 
goes short, England’s belly will be full; the ravens will 
feed us. The ravens do feed us—prompt, obedient 
ravens, hurrying hither and thither on our business over 
all the world ; smoky, black-plumed ravens of the high 
seas, Converging upon us day and night, and perching on 
the rocky rim of our island ; sooty ravens of the land, that 
come flapping and screeching through the darkness, bringing 
food from the shore to our very doors. “The ocean tramps 
and the goods trains are the humble ministers to all the 
poetry and romance of our island life. The sorrowful, 
rusty tramp nosing her way through the surges, sliding in 
between the pier-head lights of harbours and gliding out 
again in the grey, rainy dawns, blistered by tropical suns, 
sheeted with winter ice, and always coming home again 
to England, burrowing along towards the Lizard or 
the North Foreland or the South Stack or St. Abb’s 
Head ; and the goods train, more unlovely still—sooty, 
clanking chains that go dragging through the land day 
and night ; halted for an hour at a time by some wayside 
signal-box to let the lordly pleasure-trains go by; broken 
up, marshalled, re-formed, banged about in switching yards, 
and bearing, nevertheless, the very elements and essence of 
our existence—there they are, and every one takes them for 
granted. ‘They flutter their black wings through the 
night ; our table is spread in the morning ; the ravens have 
fed us.” 

There is the open secret of the miracle of the corn of 
heaven. ‘The co-operative energy and wisdom of mankind, 
the holy spirit of service toiling to reap the earth’s bounty 
and to distribute its gifts throughout the commonwealth— 
these are the instruments through which God’s purpose 
is worked out. Nature offers her goods at a price. She is 
mexhaustible, but very chancy. She demands incessant 
effort, endless dexterity of contrivance. She fails us here 


168 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


and there, in this way and in that, just so that we shall 
not stagnate and let our powers fall into disuse. She con- 
ditions her gifts so that we are kept ever on the alert, ever 
prompted toward mental and moral growth. ‘This world 
is Jack’s Bean-stalk. A brave race is given the opportunity 
to climb and wrest from the giant his golden eggs and his 
harp and his money-bags—that is to say, man, by arduous 
effort, can take command of sun and wind and rain, and 
make them serve his own purposes. He uses bottled sun- 
shine to warm himself in winter; he makes the sun take 
pictures for him, run errands for him, and heal his diseases. 
The wind is his servant to grind his corn, and drive his 
ships, and lift his aeroplanes. And he cages the rain in his 
reservoirs, and guides it through his aqueducts till wild 
flood and storm are tamed into bathroom attendants. But 
only after toilsome ascent and cunning wrestle of wit can 
the giant’s treasures be thus exploited. And Jack is made 
a man by the strife. 

But Jack always has a widowed mother to look after, 
and to share his wealth with. Whether or no she gets 
an adequate support depends not only on Jack’s industry 
and resourcefulness, but on his sympathy, dutifulness and 
love. And so with society in general. We have learnt 
to our cost in bitter times of war and war’s aftermath that 
wherever good-will fails in society, wherever selfishness, 
fear and hate poison and paralyse human relationships, it 
will follow, as night follows day, that great masses of man- 
kind will suffer the agonies of nakedness and hunger. “The 
corn of heaven is cornered. ‘The devil in man obstructs 
God’s will. 


It is instructive to recall that, according to the old story 


in Exodus, Moses commanded his people to divide up the 
manna equitably—a like quantity for every man. ‘The 


food was rationed out in daily allowances. But some greedy 
souls wanted to pile up a secret store. And the immediate 


result was that the manna rotted and bred worms. 5o long 


THE CORN OF HEAVEN 169 


as the rule of the commonwealth was obeyed all went well, 
and every man was wholesomely fed. So soon as greed 
and trickery crept in, the rot spread, and God’s miracle 
of food was turned to loathsomeness. ‘The story may not ' 
be very accurate history, but it is very sound morality. 
For indubitably we do benefit by God’s succour contingently 
upon our obedience to His law. Our sins against brother- 
hood rot and ruin the very means whereby we live. Because 
men gamble for private gain, it will come about that immense 
stores of food are left rotting at the quay-sides ; whole 
harvests are held up ; ship-loads of fish are thrown back into 
the sea, while men elsewhere are starving. ‘The profiteer 
hangs on to his goods to catch a rising price, and they come 
stale and infected into the market. Or it may even pay 
him to destroy half his produce so as to keep up an exaggerated 
price for the remainder. All such devil’s tricks have their 
terrible results in injury to society. We cannot flout God’s 
laws with impunity. And His law is thatmankind shall reap 
the fruits of the earth only by the twin principles of labour 
and justice, by unselfish effort in production and distribu- 
tion, When those two principles guide society the corn 
of heaven is ours, and all are rich in common wealth. When 
either of those principles is disregarded, society remains 
impoverished, underbred and _ inefficient—a__ half-baked 
scone, as Hosea said of Ephraim, overdone in wasteful 
luxury at one end and underdone in pitiful destitution at 
the other. 

Hence our abiding need for that simple and fundamental 
prayer for daily bread, the prayer of that Church which is 
the holy fellowship of the faithful, through which God’s 
will gets ministered to mankind. Only where God’s 
Spirit is really incarnated can the hungry be fed and the 
poor enriched, But when His Spirit is present this blessed 
effect is assured and inevitable. For our God never fails 
us. ‘‘ Happy is he,” sang the old psalmist, “that hath 
‘the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord 


170 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


his God: which executeth justice for the oppressed, which 
giveth food to the hungry.” It is literally and irreversibly 
true. He and He alone “ satisfieth the longing soul, and 
filleth the hungry soul with goodness.” He always, and He 
alone, “hath filled the hungry with good things.” No 
other power does this but God working in the hearts and 
minds of men. And the only way to open up our human 
nature to His entry, till we embody Him more and more 
fully, is by prayer: the spiritual effort to bring our wills— 
so short-sighted and perverse and errant—into captivity 
to His will which is utterly wise and good, and under the 
guidance of which we may all share a life that is life indeed. 

We have hardly glimpsed as yet the rare wealth that 
will be ours one day when God is really known and fully 
honoured over all the earth, “Then the parched land 
shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.” 
Our present civilization will seem a starved and squalid 
sort of life when men look back upon it from those splendid 
eras of the future. Yet they will see how all along, from 
the dim beginnings of history, God was leading humanity 
toward a serene prosperity. Exactly in the measure that 
they understood Him and obeyed Him was true wealth 
guaranteed to them. And in marvellous moments, amid 
the drear deserts of earthly discipline, when some heroic 
God-intoxicated leader stood out for awhile as a witness and 
a commander to common men, the doors of heaven were 
opened, and man, in utter astonishment, did eat angel’s 


food, 


‘ 
Pf 


E WALLS OF | 


; 
na ' 
oa 


ae CHO 

















Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel : 
none went out, and none came in. And the Lord said unto Joshua, ~— 
See, I have given into thine hand Jericho. And ye shall compass the ie 
city, all ye men of war, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets. 
And it shall come to pass that the wall of the city shall fall down aaleg. 
and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him. 
JOSHUA vi. 1-5. Hy 


‘a 


XIII 


THE WALLS OF JERICHO 


HE increasing hatred of war in modern Christendom 

leads many earnest folk into too hasty a deprecation 
of the fierce battle-tales in our earlier Scripture records. 
We have at last grown sensitive to the accusation that 
Europe, while bearing the Christian name, has all along 
been striking a compromise between Christ and Odin. 
And in our modern eagerness to attain a pacific ethic we 
are a little unduly scared at any effort to trace God’s hand 
in the wild warrings of old Israel. ‘There are folk who 
would rejoice to see the Old Testament scrapped. 

Well ! we cannot, indeed, regard these old tales with the 
same complacency that was characteristic equally of our 
Puritan forefathers and of their Roman opponents in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among them there 
seems to have been an almost gloating relish for the memory 
of how the Chosen People slaughtered their heathen foes. 
Their God was a man of war, scattering his enemies by 
hard thwacks, It seemed an easy way to get rid of evil, 
and the Old Testament gave such convenient precedents. 
So Europe of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation 
very strenuously followed Joshua as a short cut to following 
Jesus. 

Even to-day there still linger in the intellectual purlieus 
of society views of Biblical inspiration on the level of the 
Moslem worship of the Quran, which make men persuade 
themselves into believing that everything Israel did under 


the assumed command of God must have been entirely 
173 


174 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


right and a model for all ages. “I’o such readers the inspira- 
tion of the deed is the guarantee of its rightness, and not 
vice versa, Very astonishing feats are performed in the 
apologetic exegesis which this standpoint necessitates. But 
the average modern conscience cannot boast of the requisite 
agility for such performances, and they are gone sadly out 
of fashion. 

To-day we may still believe that Israel was a people of 
God’s choice; but we see that all peoples are in their 
different ways and degrees called and chosen for specific 
achievements in this world—as, indeed, the Old ‘Testament 
at its best itself teaches us: “ Are ye not as the children 
of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith 
the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land 
of Egypt? And the Philistines from Caphtor, and the 
Syrians from Kir?” And while we recognize that Israel 
was, indeed, a divine instrument in history, we see that the 
methods employed for its advancement were nevertheless 
not always such as a developing ethical insight can approve. 
But if such considerations lead us contemptuously to throw 
aside the battle stories of Israel as morally worthless to the 
modern Christian world, we are letting an indiscriminate 
impatience deprive us of many a stirring lesson, and denuding 
ancient history of the imperishable values that it really pos- 
sesses. Heaven avert the day when our English history 
books will be carefully expurgated of all reference to Agin- 
court and the Armada! And heaven preserve us from the 
emasculated Bible which the timid morality of some moderns 
would reduce us to ! 

The reaction from an earlier exaggerated glorification 
of Israel as an unique people before whom all others were 
but as dirt to be trampled under foot, with all the attempted 
justification of Israel’s most barbaric deeds which such a 
view made plausible, has resulted in a prevalent view of 
Israel as a mere marauding clan, breaking into its neigh- 
bours’ lands without semblance of right, and inspired by a | 


THE WALLS OF FERICHO 175 


religion differing merely in nomenclature from those of 
the various peoples who surrounded it. Each point of 
view is equally distant from the truth. Israel, with all 
its moral limitations and failures, was yet inspired by truths 
about God which lifted its life distinctly above the level 
of contemporary civilizations. And in its fierce battles 
for the Promised Land it was after all fighting for its old 
home. If it had made conquest of an entirely new country 
it would have been doing what all expanding nations have 
done through all time. But Israel had as good right in 
Palestine as anyone else. ‘Territory cannot have been 
very clearly defined among these primitive, and often 
nomadic, tribes. But if any land was homeland to Israel 
it was assuredly the country where Abraham had settled 
and bought the ground for his sepulchre. Besides, it is 
not certain that the whole nation of Israel was captive 
in Egypt: some clans may, it is thought, have remained 
all along in Palestine, and if so, Israel’s right there was all 
the stronger. 

However, these questions are of little import. The fact 
remains that Israel had to win its way into Palestine with 
the sword. And it shared such notions of military ethic 
as were current in the ancient world. Joshua’s wars were 
wars of extermination, very bloody and horrible to con- 
template. But such ruthlessness was not abnormal. And 
it is no good bringing forward our modern squeamishness 
to judge the ancients. “They are not our models, ‘Their 
methods would outrage and horrify us if advocated to-day— 
although we can use a good deal of frightfulness ourselves 
without turning a hair, and have our polite, but still deadly, 
ways of making war on women and children, But we 
have to take civilization as we find it at different periods 
of the world’s history, and see what elements of nobility 
shine out from men’s deeds amid such and such a moral 
environment. We shall not turn to Joshua to learn tender- 
ness, But he was a man strict to his own standard of 


176 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


uprightness and with a quick faith in God as he understood 
Him. And what a bonny fighter he was! His strategy 
at Ai and his smashing assault down the pass of Beth-horon 
stand out with real notableness in the annals of war. 

But the incident in his career which is stamped most 
firmly in memory is, from the startling manner in which itis 
recorded, that of the fall of Jericho. 

‘The death of Moses had left Israel on the plateau of Moab 
looking with hungry eyes across Jordan to the old homeland 
of their desire. But the entry thereto looked to be full 
of formidable dificulty. “The crossing of the Jordan was 
itself a serious problem ; and directly opposite such crossing 
lay the strong-looking city of Jericho backed by precipitous 
hills and ringed in with running brooks. ‘There, it seemed, 
lay the key to Palestine. Having once secured Jericho, 
with its great fruiting woodlands of date-palm and its in- 
exhaustible waters, the people would have a rich and plentiful 
base from which at leisure to spread over the central uplands, 

How the crossing of the impetuous-rushing Jordan was 
at last achieved we do not know. It is possible that a 
landslip into the narrow river bed upstream had temporarily 
dried up the channel, and made an apparently miraculous 
highway across the river; for such a result from landslip 
is known to have taken place in Jordan in the thirteenth 
century, and it may well have taken place also in Joshua’s 
age, and provided him with an advantage which he eagerly 
seized and which he could not fail to ascribe to divine aid. 
That would seem to be the natural interpretation of the 
reiterated statement that Israel crossed the Jordan dry- 
shod. Without some such extraordinary dislocation of the 
stream such a thing was impossible, for the shallowest fords 
of Jordan are three feet deep. And the way in which the 
crossing of the river is impressed upon future generations 
as a prodigy of divine help surely marks the fact that Joshua 
took advantage of some quite startling, almost incredible, 
occurrence, and led his people across in a sort of dream of 


4 
4 
] 





THE WALLS OF FERICHO 177 


amazement and awe at God’s singular and crowning mercy 
to them, which doubtless deepened their sense of destined 
victory, their confidence in God’s miraculous power to 
defend and promote them. 

This confidence must have been still further increased by 
Joshua’s vision of the captain of the angelic host. ‘The 
impressive little fragment of legend which records this 
vision breaks off tantalizingly, and is all too abrupt to 
be adequately understood. But somehow there came to 
Joshua—perhaps as he stood in prayer in some little sanctuary 
beside the camp at Gilgal—an intimate sense of message 
from God. Warrior as he is, his vision takes the form of 
a soldier with drawn sword who announces himself as 
captain of the Lord’s host. And Joshua was doubtless 
roused afresh to a sense of divine aid in his campaign. He 
won new confidence and a still more determined will to 
succeed, 

Such confident conviction is more than half the battle 
in any strife; and it is the secret here of the falling walls 
of Jericho. Jericho was overthrown by sheer menace. 
It made no effort to stand assault. It was unnerved and 
beaten by the mere display of Israel’s power coming upon 
it exhilarated by the astonishing passage of the Jordan. 
It has often been pointed out that Jericho never did stand 
a siege. Despite many features in its situation which 
promised strength, the torrid atmosphere in that low-lying 
plain, far beneath sea-level, was enervating in the extreme. 
It bred a race utterly different from the hardy hillmen who, 
a mere twenty miles away, yet lived in the climate of a 
different continent. ‘To pass from Jerusalem down the 
steep gorge to Jericho was to pass, in a day’s walk, from 
a climate like mid-Europe to that of the tropics. Jericho 
enjoyed an extraordinary fertility. Josephus calls her 
neighbourhood “a divine region, the fattest in Judza.” 
Her year was one long summer. But her people, enervated 
by the extreme heat, had no fight in them. They fell 

12 


178 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


before every enemy who ever attacked them all down the 
ages. ‘‘ That her walls fell down at the sound of Joshua’s 
trumpets,” says Sir George Adam Smith, “is no exaggera- 
tion, but the soberest summary of all her history. No great 
man was born in Jericho; no heroic deed was ever done 
in her. She has been called ‘the key’ and ‘the guard- 
house” of Judza; she was only the pantry. She never 
stood a siege, and her inhabitants were always running 
away.” Joshua’s spies had already reported to him that 
the people in Jericho were ready to melt away in front of 
him. Hence his plan seems to have been both to terrify 
them with a great show of power, and, after puzzling them 
by an apparently meaningless strategy, to surprise them by 
a sudden assault which would carry everything before it. 
The deliberate theatricality of all the circuiting of the 
city, with the holy ark and the horn-blowing priests leading 
the way, was no doubt very terrifying to the poor inhabitants 
crouching behind their walls, and at the same time very 
stimulating to Israel. A sort of hieratic dignity was thus 
given to the fight ; and the ridiculous ease of the subsequent 
entry the more easily took on a supernatural colouring in 
consequence. 3 

One is reminded of the “ Alleluia Victory,” when Bishop 
Germanus, in the fifth century, led the British against an 
invading host of Picts and Saxons. At the sudden con- 
certed shout of “ Alleluia !” the heathen are said to have 
fled forthright and left the British to a bloodless victory. 
So, other features of this story remind one of the famous 
Northumbrian fight at Heavenfield near Hexham, when 
King Oswald fought for faith and life against the pagan 
Cadwallon. We are told that as Oswald slept in his tent 
on the night before the battle, a vision of St. Colomba came 
to him—a colossal figure standing in the midst of the camp, 
shielding beneath his robes all but a small portion of the 
army, and promising the king victory. Oswald therefore 
arose, caused a cross to be hastily planted on an eminence 


THE WALLS OF FERICHO 179 


as a standard for his troops, and having made his whole army 
kneel in prayer, sounded the charge, and speedily rolled up 
the opposing army across the moors and utterly routed 
them. 

Or one thinks of the still more famous story of the vision 
of Constantine on the night before the battle of the Milvian 
Bridge, which was to set the first Christian emperor on the 
throne of Rome. He saw what he took to be a cross of 
light in the sky, and heard the words, “‘ In this sign conquer.” 
On the morrow he won his battle; and from that day 
forward the cross replaced the eagle on the standards of 
Rome. These are vague old legends; but memorable, 
like the stories of Joshua, as showing the power of faith 
to put impetuous valour into men, and to abash an enemy, 
however strongly entrenched in material resources. “’This 
is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” 

As religion advances in moral content, and men’s concept 
of the Divine Will approximates more nearly to the standard 
of Jesus Christ, we find better ways of fighting God’s war 
on earth than the way of the sword. But the fighting 
instinct in man is ineradicable. And his warfare with 
wrong grows more and more persistent as the ages go by. 
Only he begins to rely upon spiritual weapons, and learns 
that the victories of reason and good-willare far more fruitful 
than the clumsy victories of muscle and cunning, with 
whatever earnest intent these may be used. A _ beautiful 
Chinese fable tells how a courtier once reported to his 
sovereign the misdeeds and disloyalty of various enemies to 
the throne, and urged upon him the necessity of destroy- 
ing them. “ Very well,” said the king, “they shall be 
destroyed.” And he ordered them to his presence. On 
their arrival the king treated them with such courtesy and 
good-will that they were ashamed out of their ill-doing, and 
one and all rallied to him with enthusiasm. ‘The courtier 
was astonished and aggrieved: “ Did you not vow to 
destroy your enemies, O king?” “Indeed, yes,” said 


180 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


the king; “‘ where are my enemies? ‘They exist no 
longer.” ‘That is the true Christian secret on the lips 
of some old Chinese writer. And: such is the warfare 
which brings abiding success.) The moral equivalent 
for war is the evangelical campaign of the love that beareth 
all things and hopeth all things, and never faileth. “The walls 
of every citadel are doomed to fall before that power. 

A hundred years ago that great empire of China itself lay 
shut up behind its huge encircling walls, impenetrable to 
the ideas of the outer world. “The Chinese were forbidden 
to teach their language to any foreigner on pain of death. 
There was, indeed, some bartering of goods with other 
nations at the ports. But all intrusion into the country was 
most jealously guarded against ; so that to win the heart and 
mind of China into fellowship with Christendom seemed 
an utterly hopeless task. But there was one man who 
would not be beaten. Robert Morrison went forth alone - 
to lay siege to China. He settled on the little island of 
Macao at the mouth of the Canton river, and laboured 
amid enormous difficulties for a quarter of a century to 
open a way into that entrenched and stubborn country. 
He was single-handed, but he carried the ark of his faith 
with him to the onset. And the walls of China fell down 
flat before his bloodless attack. Decade by decade that 
great land has been penetrated, until, less than a century 
after Morrison’s death, we see a China upheaving with 
the ferment of European thought, and calling out on every 
hand for Christian instruction ; while the leaders of its 
republican revolution publicly ask for the prayers of the 
Christian Church. ‘There is a triumphing example of the 
true battle of God. It demands every quality of perfect 
warriorship—a reckless courage, a sagacious strategy, an 
unbending endurance, and indomitable hope. Before such 
prowess as this the violent soldiership of the sword looks 
like the wild, unreflecting effort of irresponsible boys. 
Let it never be imagined that the glorious ardours of battle 


THE WALLS OF FERICHO 181 


are to be lost to civilized men ; that the life of the future 
is to be tame and fat and unadventurous. Man’s three 
primal instincts are for battle, love and worship. “These 
are the impulses of all our action, and the soul of all our 
poetry. “They change in character and objective, but 
they can never be eradicated. Always there abides in life 
that which must be hated, renounced, fought against and 
overcome, as truly as there abides that which must be clung 
to, loved and cherished, and that which must be adored, 
obeyed and hallowed. We owe for ever a threefold duty 
of renunciation, attachment and submission. But the 
hate to which we are called is the hate of hate. And less 
and less shall our warfare be with physical weapons ; more 
and more shall it be the wrestle of the spirit which alone 
can convert evil will to good willamong men. The romance 
of battle remains. As our spiritual imagination broadens 
and deepens it is, indeed, enhanced. It passes out of 
the trumpery regions of spite and malice and arrogant 
domination into the great areas of redemptive agony where 
the eternal Armageddon is waged until we “ finally beat 
down Satan under our feet.” 

There is a negative pacifism, easy and sluggish, which 
avoids battle because it is too indifferent to energize on 
behalf of good. “The pessimistic nihilism of Buddhist belief 
runs easily into that temper of accidie which holds that 
there is nothing worth striving for. But to the Christian 
this is one of the deadly sins. We do not win true gentleness 
by the mere avoidance of confiict, by the effort to disentangle 
ourselves from the responsibilities of life. “That is a vain, 
unhelpful quietism. But we do have to spiritualize con- 
flict and raise it from personal to philanthropic ends. And 
as we do so, physical force will have less and less place in 
it. “Through the long ages of cruel carnage man has been 
slowly learning how to fight and what to fight for. His 
blunders have been terrible. The God-given instinct 
for battle has been used for base and selfish ends: it has 


182 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


been dragged into the service of vainglorious ambition, of 
wanton sport, of wild greed. But it has been used too— 
often with clumsy weapons and mistaken judgments—with 
an intent that earnestly strove toward good. And therefore 
we can still look back to many a fierce war in the past, and, 
while we deplore its sad ferocity, yet trace in it elerente 
of faithful heroism, of glorious sacrificial energy, which 
make it still shine out to us with a noble glamour. We 
cannot pretend to approve of the exterminating methods 
of a Joshua ; but, full as he was of the customary savagery 
of his day, he was actuated nevertheless by an honourable 
faith in a God of rigorous integrity, a Holy One intolerant 
of sin. His age had but advanced a step or two in the 
true knowledge of God, and therefore its wars in His Name 
were marred by many a deed immoral to us. But, accord- 
ing to their lights, the old Israelites attempted to serve their 
God faithfully, with a fierce fanaticism of ardour, sound in 
intent however blind in insight. And it was this faith 
of theirs which turned them into the Ironsides of that old 
Canaanite world. 

We, with our deeper knowledge of God as Father of all 
mankind, have other methods to pursue in our task of 
getting His Will done upon earth. But we may still admire 
their old warrior-passion, and still gain from the tales of 
their warfare some impulses of valour and constancy lest 
we grow inert and indolent, lamely tolerant of wrong, 
crying “* Peace !”’ where there is no peace, sheltering our 
slovenly souls under the pretence that our easy-going 
acquiescence is the charity of God. But God’s love is a 
consuming fire, an ardent, flaming passion bent upon the 
destruction of evil. “ Righteousness at any price” is the 
war-cry of God, even at the price of stern punishment ; 
but He 1s more eager to bear the cost of evil than to inflict 
it, and it is only by sharing His battle in His spirit that we 
can gain His peace. : 

But battle there is, and ever must be. Jericho, the city 





THE WALLS OF FERICHO 183 


of the sensual man, must be overthrown before we can 
mount to Jerusalem, the city of our spiritual dreams. It 
looks a stiff task, but its overthrow is certain if we compass 
it about with the ark ofa vital faith, “The entrenched powers 
of wrong cannot stand against the assault of the Holy Ghost. 
Age by age we do see deep-seated evils undermined and 
falling, as human society wins more and more of the faith 
that redeems it into brotherhood, purity and truth. Each 
generation has its stroke to make, climbing over the brave 
bodies of the dead, and winning an inch onward to the 
final victory. 


Charge once more, then, and be dumb! 
Let the victors, when they come, 

When the forts of folly fall, 

Find thy body by the wall. 


(eget tay 
res 


sean, a - facile 
EES, rare 


ll 
4 
fe 





_ THE FLEECE 


whl 4 
Mes 
fh hy 


¥ 

se 
i 
, 


i 
ue ’ “ 
m both 


a a ay | 





And Gideon said unto God, If thou wilt save Israel by mine hand, 
as thou hast spoken, behold, I will put a fleece of wool on the threshing- 
floor ; if there be dew on the fleece only, and it be dry on all the ground, 
then shall I know that thou wilt save Israel by mine hand as thou hast 
spoken. And it was so: for he rose up early on the morrow, and 
pressed the ficece together, and wringed the dew out of the fleece, a 
bowlful of water. 

JUDGES vi. 36-38. 


The time would fail me to tell of Gideon . . . who through faith 
subdued kingdoms, out of weakness was made strong, waxed valiant 
in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. 

HEBREWS Xl. 32-34. 





XIV 
GIDEON AND THE FLEECE 


HE text of these chapters in the Book of Judges 

recording the exploit of Gideon is full of difficulty. 
Not only has the story been manipulated again and again 
by successive editors, but the Hebrew sentences are in 
several cases unreadable, and their intended meaning can 
only be guessed at. But in spite of the numerous little 
puzzles that vex our scholars, there emerges a story of 
romantic adventure as thrilling as was ever penned by 
Stevenson or Dumas. Yet, having been thus over-written 
and reshaped from time to time, it is a story that gives a 
notable instance of the need for common sense and imagina- 
tive insight if one is to get at the actual truth of it. 

It opens with a description of the hard times experienced 
in Israel owing to incessant raids by the desert Arabs— 
‘the Midianites, the Amalekites, and the children of the 
east.” No harvest could be safely gathered, nor cattle 
and sheep safely herded Men went armed to their field- 
work. Whole villages would at whiles be driven to take 
refuge in cavesand forts. ‘The land was under terror of these 
marauders, who swarmed across Jordan like a flight of 
locusts—much as our Saxon forefathers lived in daily terror 
of the incursions of the wild Danish vikings. 

Suddenly, as we are told, there comes upon this troubled 
scene a prophet from the Lord. But the narrative of what 


he said and did stops short ; and in place of it we have a 
187 


188 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


story of the angel of the Lord appearing to Gideon as he 
threshes wheat in his wine-press: not daring to do his 
work openly upon the threshing-floor—which usually 
stood in some prominent windy situation—for fear that 
some lurking Arabs might be on the watch. 

Common sense suggests that we have here two variants 
of the same story, the angel of the Lord in the one case 
being identical with the prophet in the other. ‘The angel 
variant is highly dramatic, full of supernatural incident— 
such a story as popular tradition loves to shape. But one 
can hardly doubt that its basis in fact is the much more 
prosaic account of the arrival of a prophet with his words 
of rebuke and encouragement. The word “angel” 
is very loosely used in the Old Testament. A prophetic 
messenger was a very true angel of God. But, once recog- 
nized as such, the reshaping of all the incidents of his visit 
into a supernatural mould was easily and almost uncon- 
sclously made. If the simpler account had been maintained 
in our Bible we should probably have been told that this 
prophet sought out Gideon in his home at Ophrah, and 
that Gideon entertained him with a meal. But in the story 
as elaborated by pious imagination the prophet has become 
a theophany of Yahweh himself, and the simple meal has 
become a sacrifice miraculously consumed by fire which bursts 
from the solid rock when Yahweh’s staff touches it. All this 
is the work of pious fancy colouring a sober tale of quite 
normal incidents, which nevertheless had such a memorable 
issue that God’s hand was strongly felt in them ; and so 
the whole thing is presented, in later telling, as a marvellous 
theophany of God. ‘To get at the facts we must discount 
this supernaturalism, but without losing that sense of provi- 
dential interference which is the root from which the super- 
naturalism springs. 

The result of the prophet’s visit to Gideon showed that 
he was truly an angel of Yahweh : for we are told that the 
very same night Gideon got a few of his labourers together 


GIDEON AND THE FLEECE 189 


and, under cover of the darkness, destroyed the altar of 
Baal which stood near their village. 

These altars to the local Baals were evidently customary 
at this period, Probably they were not thought of as 
any infringement of the worship of the Lord, but as harm- 
less additions thereto. Gideon’s father, as headman of 
the village, had set up this altar, and the people were proud 
of it. But to some minds of deeper reflection and higher 
conscientiousness, like this wandering prophet who had 
come thither, the presence of these Baal altars was an affront 
to the Lord; and Israel’s discomfiture at the hands of 
the Arabs was held to be a sign of the Lord’s displeasure 
at this divided allegiance. ‘The first step toward victory 
was to demolish these lingering memorials of paganism 
and be given up whole-heartedly to Yahweh alone. No 
doubt Gideon was acting upon the urgent appeal of the 
prophet when he thus overthrew Baal’s altar. For he 
himself was not until then very deeply convinced of Yahweh’s 
presence and power. When the prophet greets him with 
the customary phrase “ The Lord be with thee "—just as 
we say “good-bye” to each other—Gideon catches him 
up with the reply : “ If the Lord were with us, how could 
we be in such desperate straits? We are told He did 
great things for our forefathers of old; but where is He 
now?” ‘The prophet’s conversation, however, and his 
solemn summons to Gideon to be prepared to undertake 
the leadership of the people, apparently brought the latter 
to a more faithful frame of mind ; and the destruction of 
the Baal’s altar is the result. 

When the deed was discovered next morning the villagers 
were desperately angry, and would have made an end of 
Gideon there and then had not his father parried their 
attack with a clever speech, pointing out that if the Baal 
were anything of a god he would have defended his own 
altar; what was the good of wasting time and spilling 
blood for a twopenny godlet of that sort? So the matter 


190 THE-LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


rested ; and apparently Gideon was very soon in high favour 
again with everybody. 

He was a younger son in an obscure clan, but he must 
already have shown something of his great quality as a 
soldier or the prophet would never have sought him out 
and impressed on him the high duty of captaincy. He had 
sound personal reasons for an undying hatred of the Arabs, 
for two of his brothers had been slain by them in some 
previous raid, and the duty of blood-revenge was laid upon 
his soul. After the prophet’s visit he lingers in his farm 
at Ophrah, to all appearances a simple farmer still, but 
doubtless laying his plans against the hour that soon would 
strike. The site of Ophrah is unknown; but it seems 
to have been in the neighbourhood of Shechem, and therefore 
near the head of the Wady Farah—one of the two great 
valleys up which the Arab incursions were bound to come, 
the other being the vale of Jezreel farther northward. Its 
position was, therefore, an exposed and dangerous one, likely 
to suffer the first brunt of the Arab assault. When the 
next raid does take place, however, it is by the northern 
passage: “The children of the east assembled themselves 
together ; and they passed over Jordan, and pitched in the 
valley of Jezreel. But the Spirit of the Lord came upon 
Gideon ; and he blew a trumpet; and the people were 
gathered together after him.” Now he stood forth as 
the recognized captain of Israel, and was going to give the 
Arabs such battle as these nomad raiders had never before 
been faced with. ‘The terrified and hunted Israelites 
were rallying under a new-found leader to strike a decisive 
blow for their country’s salvation. 

And here, at the threshold of the fight, we are confronted 
by the strange tale of the fleece. It looks, on the face of 
it, a mere legend of impossible miracle like the previous 
story of the angel striking fire out of the rock. Well! 
it has been shaped into that form indeed. As it stands 
it is unhistorical ; just as the numbers of Gideon’s army— 


ee en ee 





GIDEON AND THE FLEECE IQ! 


the twenty-two thousand who turned back from the fight, 
and so on—are quite unhistorical. But I think there may 
be fact underlying it ; that it is really on all fours with the 
story of Gideon’s collection of a special band, and his daring 
reconnaissance of the enemy camp. It was not a search 
after a miraculous sign of God’s support ; it was part of 
a careful general’s preparation for a surprise attack, What 
Gideon needed for such an attack as he had planned to 
offer was a dark and rather thick night: clear moonlight 
or starlight in an unclouded heaven would have been fatal 
to him. But in Palestine, throughout the summer months 
from May to October, it is very rare for the sky to be other 
than cloudless. There is no rain. But in the cloudless 
nights dew falls very heavily. Such nights -vould not 
suit Gideon. He wanted an overcast night, when the 
dew would be much lessened, but when there might in 
consequence be more mist in the air. 

Dew falls with the chilling of the air as it passes over a 
cold surface. ‘This is the principle on which are made the 
strange dew-ponds on our English chalk hills. High on 
the summit of the downs one may come across these ponds, 
many of them maintaining their water through seasons 
of heavy drought, yet unfed by any spring. It is the dew 
alone which fills them. ‘The method of making them is to 
dig a shallow basin in the chalk, lay down a layer of straw 
or rushes as a non-conductor, and cover the surface with 
clay. “The chalk hills radiate much heat at night and warm 
the air above them with its load of moisture. But if at 
any spot the radiation is checked by laying a non-conductor 
on the ground, the air passing above this is cooled, and can 
no longer hold its moisture, which is dropped as dew. Hence 
the non-conducting bed of the dew-ponds draws down on 
their cold surface a great quantity of dew, and keeps them 
alive even in seasons when the springs fail. 

Gideon’s fleece would act in just the same way. Laid 
out upon a threshing-floor it would pick up dew even on 


192 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


a night when the ground was dry. And it was for such 
a night that Gideon was waiting; for a dewless night 
meant an overcast night in which his surprise attack might 
be launched with good promise of success. ‘The story of 
the fleece is at bottom, then, probably nothing but a record 
of the trick by which Gideon sought for weather signs ; 
the wet fleece on the dry ground told him that the nights 
were thickening, and that he might, perhaps, hope for one of 
the dense mists which do occasionally occur in the summer 
nights in Palestine. So simple a trick it was that, to later 
editors of the story, it appeared quite inadequate as an 
assurance that Gideon was backed by Providence ; and so 
they represent him asking for a reversion of the process—for 
a dry fleece on a wet ground : a quite impossible happening— 
before he feels sure that God’s aid is guaranteed to him. 
But this extension of. the tale is the work of pure fancy. 
Gideon, we may be sure, felt the divine support well enough 
when he found a promise of just the sort of weather he 
needed for his enterprise. He would see God’s hand in 
such good luck, and go forward with a high heart to his 
desperate adventure. 

The next point was to select his men, He wanted a 
small band of specially careful scouts, for everything depended 
on their surprising the enemy. ‘They were going to win, 
if at all; by sheer bluff and deception. He needed the Alan 
Brecks among his soldiers. And the test by which he selects 
them was how they drank water in the stream which sprang 
out at the foot of Gilboa and ran away down the valley 
in the face of the enemy. ‘“ Anybody,” writes Sir George 
Adam Smith, “‘ who has looked across the scene can appre- 
ciate the suitability of the test which Gideon imposed on 
his men. ‘The stream, which makes it possible for the 


occupiers of the hill to hold also the well against an enemy 


on the plain, forbids them to be careless in their use of 
the water ; for they drink in face of that enemy, and the 
reeds and shrubs which mark its course afford ample cover 


GIDEON AND THE FLEECE 192 


for hostile ambushes. ‘Those Israelites, therefore, who 
bowed themselves down on their knees, drinking head- 
long, did not appreciate their position or the foe ; whereas 
those who merely crouched, lapping up the water with 
one hand while they held their weapons in the other and 
kept their face to the enemy, were aware of their danger 
and had hearts ready against all surprise.” 

Gideon had tested his weather and tested his men, but 
even now his cautious mind is not satisfied. Still another 
step remains to be taken. He needs to make a close recon- 
naissance of the enemy’s camp. So off he goes after dusk 
with one trusty follower, crossing the stream, creeping 
from bush to bush or dragging himself flat on his face through 
the long grass, till he has crossed the valley to the roots of 
the opposite hill, where the Arab tents are hung and the 
camels tethered. “They dodge the sentries and sneak in 
among the tents. And there, for a good omen, they hear 
an enemy soldier recounting his dream of the flat barley- 
cake that rolled into their camp and knocked one of the 
tents over. Gideon has seen and heard enough. Back 
he creeps through the line of sentries and across the valley 
to his own men. His instructions have meanwhile been 
carried out: the three hundred are awaiting orders, while 
the rest have withdrawn into the camp, where their fires 
could no doubt be seen by the Midianites. “The chosen 
band is armed with trumpets and with pitchers in which 
torches are held. “Thus equipped, they stealthily cross the 
valley once more, and breaking into three groups, approach 
the Arab camp at different angles. “They reach their 
positions soon after ten o’clock, when the watch had just 
been changed and all was wrapped in silence again. “Then 
Gideon gives his signal; a great blast of trumpets and a 
sudden war-cry startle the night ; every soldier dashes his 
pitcher to the ground, and three hundred torches blaze 
up in the darkness from all points of the compass. “he 
startled Arabs believe themselves overwhelmingly sur- 


‘3 


\ 


194 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


rounded, and make a dash down the valley eastward along 
the only line that seems open. In the confusion of their 
flight they turn upon each other in mistake for Israel. 
And so the whole unwieldy mass of them goes stamped- 
ing and blundering down toward Jordan. But Gideon’s 
messengers rouse the country-side, and hem them in. ‘Their 
two princes Oreb and Zeeb, the Raven and the Wolf 
(for the Arabs, like the Red Indians and our own Boy 
Scouts, loved these animal titles, and maintain them even 
to-day), were slain, and their heads brought up to Gideon, 
who was already across Jordan pursuing the remnant that 
had escaped. Another great victory is won on-the edge 
of the desert by Gideon’s tired and hungry, but now exalted, 
troops. ‘The two Arab kings, Zebah and Zalmunna, are 
taken, and the whole nomad host scattered in wild flight 
into the eastern wilderness. 

It was one of I[srael’s most superb and unqualified vic- 
tories. Gideon returned home burdened with spoil. In 
the enthusiasm of the hour the people would fain have made 
him king. But the great soldier refuses, and goes back 
to his village and his farm again, begging only such portion 
of the enemy’s gold as will serve to make him an ephod— 
some image, probably, or other contrivance, plated with 
precious metal, that seems to have been used in connection 
with the casting of lots and the seeking of divine oracles. 
So the land had rest from the Arab raiders, and the man 
who had saved it turned back to his farming with the sim- 
plicity of Cincinnatus. 


Gideon is the most attractive figure among the Judges — 


or Captains of Israel—an unassuming, modest man, politic 


and suave, but a most shrewd and vigilant soldier of in- — 
domitable courage. Men said the Spirit of the Lord was — 


upon him. And what a wholesome piety it was in old 


-_ 


Israel that used such language about the mental and physical | 
qualities of good generalship! ‘They saw the presence — 
of the Lord’s Spirit in any great human faculties by which — 


a 


GIDEON AND THE FLEECE 195 


society was benefited. They saw it even in the mere 
muscular strength of Samson—that huge, incompetent, 
undisciplined bullock of a man: that strength of his, used 
for the deliverance of his people, was a gift of God. Much 
more was the brilliant generalship of Gideon an inspired 
faculty. 

Old Israel never dreamt of restricting divine inspiration 
to certain narrow departments of our being. All sound 
faculties and noble accomplishments were inspired by God, 
Did they not declare that the Spirit of the Lord came upon 
Bezaleel and Aholiab, the artificers, to make them cunning 
of skill to devise the ornaments of the Tabernacle? ‘Their 
minds were free from that foolish dichotomy of sacred and 
secular which has so narrowed and warped the conception 
of religion in many societies. “They understood that art 
cannot be beautiful, nor soldiering brave, nor statesmanship 
wise, unless God’s Spirit be in men ; and that where we 
see beauty and courage and sound policy, there, so far forth, 
we see the Spirit of God manifested. Gideon’s superb 
generalship was as much a God-given faculty as Samuel’s 
fervid conscientiousness. Great physical or mental powers 
deliberately perverted to base ends they would not have 
spoken of as being under God’s inspiration. But they 
were God’s gifts, and were capable of inspired use. For 
the Spirit of God, as Isaiah said, was a spirit entering into 
and governing all the faculties of man: it was the spirit 
of moral insight or wisdom, and it was also the spirit of witty 
intelligence and gumption in the application of that wisdom ; 
it was the spirit of prudent and suave counsel, and it was 
also the spirit of forceful determination to get things done ; 
it was the spirit of knowledge and competence, as well as 
the spirit of reverent humbleness that prevents the folly 
of a swollen head. It is revealed in the heightening and 
ennoblement of the whole man—intellect, emotions and 
will alike. A man may be inspired to fight well as to 
preach well; to make things well or to rule men well. 


196 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


Warrior and artisan, statesman, prophet and priest are 
all capable of the divine inbreathing. And we serve our 
God by putting out the best talent we have, whatever its 
nature. The story of the acrobat who did his best to 
praise God in a French church by turning his most remark- 
able somersaults in front of a statue of the Virgin till he 
sweated and fainted with his effort, expresses a true devout- 
ness 3 and one may be sure that God, despite the Psalmist, 
took delight in the legs of that man. 

The Divine Spirit ees us upward step by step, bidding 
us do the best we can in our given conditions ;_ inspiring 
a true intent, however imperfect our means ; and accept- 
ing our blundering, crude accomplishments whenever 
the effort of true sacrifice underlies them. It Is a sorry 
thing that men should be called to war. And we pray for 
the time to come when there will always be hope of a just 
settlement of dispute apart from battle. But we do not 
have to wait for ideal conditions of life before the Spirit 
of God can exhibit itself in human affairs. In the past 
the only way to break oppression often has been by war 
alone, and the soldier has acted under consecration in his 
perilous labour. “ Fustum est bellum quibus necessarium, 
et pia arma, quibus nulla, nist in armis, relinquitur spes.” 


Though the battle-flags one day be furled, the patriots 


have not fought in vain. “The sword of a Gideon or a 


Garibaldi was verily the sword of the Lord. And the 
legends of their valour ring down the ages to quicken courage 
in-us for the bloodless, but still more difficult, exploits of 
Be _Jater day. “The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
knew where to turn for inspiritment when he wanted to 


rally the young Church to the reckless adventure of the 4 


gospel and to patient endurance of fierce trials. He bade 
his comrades look back to the heroes of old, who had many 
a rough and dirty piece of work to do, but who, through 


faith, “‘ out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant — 
in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens,” Let their 


—— ee ee, 





GIDEON AND THE FLEECE 197 


example fortify us, as the scene of their exploits has become 
the symbol of our Christian warfare. 

For the scene of Gideon’s victory was that plain of 
Esdraelon or Megiddo where all Israel’s most critical fights 
took place. Here it was that Barak had defeated Sisera ; 
here it was, in a later generation, that Saul fell with the 
flower of his army before the Philistines ; and here, later 
still, Josiah was mortally wounded in the fight against 
Necho of Egypt. ‘This plain was the inevitable battle- 
field of Palestine, just as the carse of Stirling was for Scot- 
land ; for here alone, in that mountainous country, lay 
_ a practicable road for chariots and cavalry, and space enough 
to deploy a great army. The highway from Egypt to 
Assyria lay along this plain which cuts the hills of Palestine 
asunder. And it was, therefore, on this stretch of rough 
prairie that Israel’s enemies continually encamped, and 
the place became in Hebrew imagination the one pre- 
eminent, enduring seat of war. Hence, in the Apocalypse, 
when we have a vision presented to us of the eternal strife 
of God against the powers of hell, it is this historic battle- 
field of Megiddo which gives name and shape to the scene : 
the archangel Michael leads out the heavenly host upon 
familiar ground, and the whole world is summoned together 
“to the battle of that great day of God Almighty in a place 
called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.” 

‘That transfiguring of Israel’s old battlefield into the 
scene of God’s final victory is surely a very sublime stretch 
of imagination. And it typifies the whole secular effort 
of mankind to lift the instinct of battle above all private 
or sectional ends on to the plane of the divine purpose. 
But in that spiritual warfare we shall need all the resource- 
fulness and daring and fortitude of Gideon. As the scene 
of his victory has become the symbolic scene of God’s 
victory, so his prowess in arms may well be a lasting symbol 
of all valiant sainthood, and the Church may still rally 
her recruits to God’s banner with memory of the cry: 


198 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 
“The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” And above 


all, the canniness of Gideon in the memorable episode 
of the fleece may well teach us the much-needed lesson 
that sagacity is indispensable in God’s service; that our 
brains as well as our hearts are for His use ; and that there 
is no chance of our routing the enemy until we understand 
God to be a Spirit of Intelligence who seeks to quicken 
our wits, as well as a Spirit of Goodness who seeks to mould 
our characters. God cannot be well served by fools. Gideon 
fought with his head; and he refused to be hindered by 
the duffers and the cowards. And a little rigorous weeding 
out of the fools from the Christian army might have equally 
fruitful results in our day. “The pious idiots ruin the cam- 
paign Away with them ! 








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| ark of God was, and Samuel was laid down to sleep ; that the Lord calk 
Samuel: and he answered, Here am I. wa, Saas 
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XV 
A CHILD AS PROPHET 


HE Books of Samuel and Kings seem to be compiled 

from various old scraps of literature: biographical 
sketches, court memoirs, folk-tales. One early fragment 
is the biography of Samuel, preserved in part in the first 
three chapters of the book that bears his name, and con- 
tinued, possibly, in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, 
It is, so far as it goes, a very telling narrative, giving a picture 
of Samuel’s attitude and influence in the national life con- 
siderably different from the presentation of him in other 
parts of the book, which are supposed to have been written 
later and to be governed by certain dogmatic views about 
past history. 

This early document tells of Samuel’s birth, his dedica- 
tion, his boyhood in the little sanctuary at Shiloh, half-way 
between Jerusalem and Samaria ; and of his first startling 
revelation from God, and establishment as a recognized 
prophet. It is an attractive tale, one vivid little vignette 
following another from page to page : first the poor, tearful, 
childless wife mumbling her prayers in the temple, and the 
old priest accusing her of being drunk; then, after her 
child was born and weaned, the visit of mother and child 
to the temple—so glad a visit this time—-when the little 
fellow is dedicated to God, and left there at Shiloh to be 
brought up by old Eli as a sort of apprentice in the work 
of the sanctuary; then the picture of the growing boy 


in his short linen skirt, busy with his simple duties, and 
20} 


202 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


made happy with a new cloak once a year when his parents 
came up to Shiloh for the harvest festival ; and finally, 
the dramatic night scene in the temple when God’s voice 
speaks so awesomely to the lad. 

The world’s art galleries have, unfortunately, often 
been prolific sources of popular misconception as regards 
Scripture history. And if one adds to them the stained- 
glass windows of our churches and the old-time pictorial 
family Bibles, it is a wonder that any sound realistic know- 
ledge of Bible history ever manages to hold its ground. 
Here is a case in point. Sir Joshua Reynolds’ picture of 
the infant Samuel—that graceful picture of a small child 
saying his prayers—has given all modern English folk a 
quite incorrect notion of this famous incident. Samuel was 
not a mere baby when God’s Word came to him. He 
must have been some four years old, probably more, when 
he was first brought to Shiloh ; for Jewish women did 
not wean their children before the third year, sometimes 
not until the fifth or sixth ; and it is difficult to think of a 
mere baby having been left with Eli, And since his arrival 
in Shiloh his mother, we are told, had meanwhile given 
birth to five other children. ‘This means that Samuel must 
now have been a boy of at least thirteen years old, and very 
likely older. He was a growing adolescent, at the age 
when the moral sense begins to awaken, and boys and girls 
begin to concern themselves with moral and religious prob- 
lems and to form judgments on the life around them. ‘The 
word “child” in the narrative is quite indeterminate, for 
the Hebrew word so translated may cover anyone from 
a mere babe to a man of forty. We are probably safe 
in imagining Samuel as a boy in his middle ’teens. ‘There 
is nothing utterly abnormal, therefore, about his vision, 
as there would have been had he been an infant. It is 
but one very striking example of the sensitive conscientious- 
ness of young folk in their ’teens, and the indelible impression 
that may be made upon them by their first recognition of 


A CHILD AS PROPHET 203 


a real message from God coming through their own 
consciences. 

ex The lad Samuel, pursuing his temple duties, was in 
daily contact with the sons of Eli, two greedy fellows who 
made a habit of stealing more than their due share of the 
sacrificial meat. ‘These two cads not only committed 
wanton sacrilege in grabbing the dedicated portions of the 
sacrifice for the pleasure of their own bellies, but even 
caused their servants to seize the pilgrims’ offerings—if 
necessary with rough assault and battery. In this way they 
became a by-word throughout the land; the names of 
Hophni and Phineas stank in the nostrils of Israel. Old Eli 
heard the rumours of misconduct and the popular murmur- 
ings ; but, though he protested, he was too weak a man 
to interfere effectively and stop the horrid scandal of his 
sons’ misdeeds. He was old and almost blind, quite unable 
to hold in check these men of Belial. So things went on 
from bad to worse, and the sanctuary of Shiloh, where the 
sacred Ark was housed, was losing all its prestige as a centre 
for the national worship. “The very repute of Israel’s 
God was itself threatened. Could He not defend His 
own Ark from sacrilege? If not, what was He better 
than the neighbour Baals? 

Some new force was needed to cope with this situation. 
A great work for God was waiting to be done ; anda young, 
vigorous, clean conscience was needed to perceive it and to 
herald it. “That conscience discovered itself in the young 
temple apprentice. 

Like any honest boy, Samuel must long since have per- 
ceived the baseness of Eli’s sons, and scorned them. How 
often a child will intuitively see into a man’s character, and 
judge him with quiet, steady eyes even while the grown-up 
world allows him to pass muster! Childhood has a quick 
sense for essential baseness ina man. But here the wicked- 
ness was flagrant and notorious, and the popular verdict 
was there to back up the boy’s intuition of wrong, ‘Then 


204 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


it may have happened, as we are told in the latter part of 
the second chapter, that an unnamed prophet came one 
day to Shiloh and remonstrated with Eli, threatening him 
and his house with ruin. ‘The actual words put into the 
mouth of this prophet are words that could not have been 
uttered in Samuel’s day: they have clear references to 
later historical developments. And it is therefore dis- 
putable whether the story of this prophet’s visit to Shiloh 
belongs at all to the original biography of Samuel. ‘The 
point cannot be decisively determined. But it is possible 
that such a prophet did come upon the scene with 
his stern warning. And if so, his visit must have still 
further stirred the conscience of the boy already in revolt 
against the coarse doings of his masters in the temple. One 
imagines him beginning, with the fine impetuosity of youth, 
to make up his mind for a struggle against Hophni and 
Phineas. ‘Their conduct becomes the engrossing material 
of his reflections. He cannot get the scandal of it out of 
his mind, day or night. His own innocent ardour for 
God’s worship is insulted every hour by the presence of these 
sensual brutes. So the lad was brooding week after week, 
preoccupied with an intense feeling of moral outrage. It 
was the under-current of all his thoughts. _He awoke with 
it in the morning and went to bed with it at night. 
‘Well! when one’s mind is passionately preoccupied with 
a subject it will go on working upon that subject even in 
sleep. New resolutions and revelations may come to 
men even out of their dreams. “The subconscious mind 
may carry forward the waking thoughts to a new climax, 
and the man reawakens with an amazed sense of something 


given to him from without. So a Coleridge will compose | 


his Kubla Khan while he sleeps, and wake up with nothing 


more to do than to write down hastily whatever he can 


remember of a poem created entirely by his subconscious 
mind in dream. So a Stevenson will tell us how his 
Brownies came to him in sleep and invented turning-points 


A CHILD AS’ PROPHET 205 


in his stories which his wakeful mind had been toiling 
after unsuccessfully throughout the day. Any part of our 
mental self may thus go on working—the conscience as 
well as the imagination. A man starts out of sleep with a 
new idea or a new resolve, and he says God has spoken 
to him. And it is God who has spoken, if conscience be 
God’s voice. ‘The divine origin of the message is not, 
indeed, proved by the method and circumstance of its coming, 
but by its quality. As St. John of the Cross, that very 
sane saint, declares: ‘“‘ I am terrified by what passes among 
us in these days. Anyone who has barely begun to medi- 
tate, if he becomes conscious of these words during his 
self-recollection, pronounces them forthwith to be the 
work of God, and, considering them to be so, says, ‘ God 
has spoken to me,’ or ‘I have had an answer from God.’ 
But it is not true: such an one has only been speaking 
to himself. Besides, the affection and desire for these 
words, which men encourage, cause them to reply to them- 
selves and then to imagine that God has spoken.” ‘That 
is plain common sense, Yet St. John is writing thus only 
in order to guard the truth, of which he is entirely con- 
vinced, that God’s voice is to be heard at times through these 
channels of the under-mind by men spiritually prepared for 
such auditions. 

It is to be noted, further, that such communications some- 
times seem like actual objective voices—not mere thoughts 
stealing unawares upon the mind. So Jean d’Arc hears 
them, or Teresa. A man may hear himself addressed by 
name, as did Peter on the house-top at Joppa, or Paul on 
the Damascus road, or Francis when he was summoned 
-in the little ruined chapel to build God’s church. And so 
it was with the lad Samuel. A voice so real rings in his 
ear that he thinks it is old Eli calling him from the next 
room. Only after repeated disillusionment is he con- 
vinced that it is not Eli at all. It is not the voice of any 
human neighbour. It is the voice of the Holy Spirit in 


206 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


his own heart—his own higher nature asserting itself audibly 
amid his hesitant and confused brooding, and laying high 
summons upon him to become the herald of God’s judgment. 
His mind had hovered about such thoughts for months 
or years. Now the matter was clinched. Out of his 
very sleep the lad is called to take public stand against the 
men of Belial. To denounce them would probably be 
dangerous : they were not the men to suffer an interloping 
boy to make mischief for them without paying him heavily 
in revenge. No wonder Samuel had hesitated and brooded 
long over his duty. But the climax had come at last. 
‘The imperative voice rang clear. He was called to a man’s 
task. ‘“‘ Man am I grown, a man’s work must Ido... 
live pure, speak true ; else wherefore born?” And so in 
that awful and holy night as he slept in the sanctuary, this 
youth accepted his call to be God’s prophet and rose in 
the morning with God’s burden on his soul. | 
He shuddered at his task. It was a cruel word to utter 
to old Eli. What he felt compelled to say, what he was 
persuaded God had told him to say, for he had wakened to 
hear it ringing in his ears that night, was a word of doom : 
‘* Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel at which both 
ears of every one that heareth it shall tingle. Thou shalt 
tell Eli”’ (this is probably the correct rendering) “‘that I am 
about to punish his house for ever, because he knew that his 
sons were blaspheming God, and he restrained them not.” 
A terrible word for a boy to declaim to an old man, his 
benefactor and second father! As he begins to busy 
himself about his customary tasks at dawn, he wonders 
how he will find opportunity to deliver this awful message. 
But Eli makes it easy for him, commanding him on oath 
to tell him all that God had put it into his heart to say. 


And the old man bows before it, broken and humbled: — 


“Te is the Lord: let him do what seemeth him good.” 
‘The, facts were so unquestionable that Eli can have no 
doubt about the divine origin of such a message, His 


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4 CHILD AS PROPHET 1 ROT. 


own conscience acqulesces in it as the authentic voice of 
the Lord. In consequence the young Samuel at once 
begins to be pointed at as a coming prophet. His repute 
spreads upanddowntheland. Whether or no his courageous 
outburst did anything to check the wickedness of Eli’s 
sons we are not told. But very shortly afterwards the doom 
was fulfilled: Hophni and Phineas are slain in battle, 
and Eli dies from shock the same day. And Samuel is left 
master of the sanctuary at Shiloh and a recognized leader 
of the people. 

The story brings one to reflect upon the debt which 
the adult world owes to youth. “Out of the mouth of 
babes and sucklings hast thou ordained a stronghold for 
thyself, that thou mightest still the enemy.” ‘There are, 
in good sooth, many ways in which this old world is saved 
by its youth—in which our children are the defenders of 
God among us. It is they who keep the vision of fresh 
innocence and happy trust amid a society soiled, compromised, 
hardened, and suspicious with the passage of the years. It 
is they who keep the candle of hope burning, and who quicken 
the pulse of disinterested love in us. Who that has read 
it will not remember the picture of Marie in Mark Ruther- 
ford’s Deliverance—that dull and tiresome little girl who 
was so transfigured by her mother’s illness till her father 
saw her like an angel of light? “I remember once going 
to her cot in the night, as she lay asleep, and almost breaking 
my heart over her with remorse and thankfulness—remorse 
that I, with blundering stupidity, had judged her so super- 
ficially ; and thankfulness that it had pleased God to present 
to me so much of His own divinest grace. Fool that I 
was not to be aware that messages from Him are not to 
be read through the envelope in which they are enclosed. 
I never should have believed, if it had not been for Marie, 
that any grown-up man could so love a child. But now I 
doubt whether a love of that particular kind could be felt 
towards any grown-up human being—love so pure, so 


208 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


imperious, so awful. My love to Marie was love of God 
Himself as He is—an unrestrained adoration of an efflux 
from Him, adoration transfigured into love, because the 
revelation had clothed itself with a child’s form. I may 
appear extravagant, but I appeal to Jesus Himself for justi- 
fication, I had seen the Kingdom of God through a little 
child.” 

But this reflex action of innocent childhood upon adult 
hearts is not all of the debt that age owes to youth. Youth 
makes its own positive contributions towards our better- 
ment. Every young generation comes forward with its 
new ardent idealism, and eagerly plunges into the fray 
when its forbears are wearying a little and perhaps striking 
truce with evil. It is to youth that we have to look for 
our reforms ; for the new intellectual and emotional waves 
that swing forward to carry the tide of our life a little higher 
yet. We are always expectantly awaiting the new poet 
~and the new prophet, and it is among the young that we 
must seek for them. Each generation does its task, and then 
looks to its successors to carry on along some new line of 
advance, “‘ lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” 
And old age is graceless enough if it has not this hope and 
trust in youth. . As George Meredith wittily declares : 
“Tt is a point in the education of parents that they should 
learn to apprehend humbly the compliment of being out- 
witted by their own offspring.” It is, however, not the 
mere fact of the younger generation so frequently having 
better educational advantages than their elders, as decade 
by decade the institutions of social life improve, that one’s 
reflection dwells on; but rather the fresh vision which 
youth, just because it is youth, brings to bear upon life— 
its clear intuitions and its uncompromising ardour. It 
spurs forward a tired world, and brings a keen blade among 
our blunted weapons. “In holy array, like dew from 
the womb of the morning, thou hast the bands of thy youth- 
ful warriors.” So sang the psalmist as he contemplated 





A CHILD AS PROPHET 209 


the flower of Israel’s youth lying armed in their glittering 
equipment on the hill-sides when the sun rose to call them 
into battle. And so, in effect, we all look toward the great 
array of young folk who fill our roadways of a morning on 
their way to school, carrying their country’s hope in their 
satchels. “Ihey are the chief source of our inspiritment, 
the fertile field for the growth of new enterprises and higher 
ambitions. In the world’s childhood lies our perennial 
reinforcement in the unending war against wrong. 

But if our Samuels are to be of service to our Elis they must 
be dedicated to God. ‘They must be trained in His worship 
from their earliest years, if age expects to get anything valu- 
able out of them in their youth to refresh its own tired 
vision. “They must be christened, immersed in Christ, 
before they can become channels of the revolutionizing 
power of Christ ; otherwise their hot eagerness will but 
lead our world into new follies. Jesus Himself was pre- 
sented in the “emple, educated, saturated with all the best 
influence of the religion of His people, before it became 
possible for Him to herald a still higher faith and found the 
ultimate Church. No ceremony can be too public or too 
impressive for the fixing in our memory of this great need 
to dedicate childhood. It is a wise, strong and beautiful 
act for parents to present their children to God in the open 
temple, and pledge them to faith, obedience and the renuncia- 
tion of evil. Such a pledge, when it is made really opera- 
tive by sedulous and loving discipline, is a sure guarantee 
that the parents will be ultimately blessed by hearing God’s 
voice through their own offspring. “The youthful genera- 
tion, when its time comes, will then assuredly step forward 
with its fresh visions of God to advance our world one 
further step toward the ultimate kingdom. But everything 
depends upon whether or no we do really dedicate our 
children, and immerse them in the cleansing waters of our 
own faith and love and hope—baptize them, that is to say, 
into Christ. [he most appalling waste among men is 


14 


210 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


the waste of the souls of children who grow up uncared 


for and undisciplined, never won for the worship of God, 
never touched into holy dream and vision through His 
sanctuary. “Lhe world may now and again have obscurely 
buried some mute, inglorious Milton; but much more 
certainly it is, in every age, leaving unawakened the con- 
sciences of many -young Samuels, and losing voice after 
voice that might have spoken for God among us, if they 
had first been taught to listen for God. ‘The pity of it— 
that these fresh boys and girls should be robbed of their 
spiritual achievements by our neglect! We need them 
all. Weneed them bitterly. Every child is meant to be a 
new word of God made flesh for us ; aye, and will be so, 
unless our carelessness thwarts the Divine Purpose and turns 
these potential messengers of His into a sad crowd of the 
spiritually deaf and dumb. Our negligence in dedicating 
childhood holds back the fair future of mankind. For 
we can never be sure of steady moral progress in this world 
unless the young generation is a christened generation. 


Keep the young generations in hail, 
And bequeath them no tumbled house ! 


The prophets and saviours of mankind do not arise hap- 
hazard. It may puzzle us to trace their inborn qualities 
to their ultimate hereditary sources ; but the part that 
nurture plays in their development is frequently not difficult 
to trace, and the old saying is not far wrong that there 
was never a great man who had nota great mother. “* Give 
me the children for the first seven years of their life,” says 
a wise priest, “‘and I care not who has them afterwards.” 
We must put the child into the sanctuary of a pious nurture 


if in his youth he is to see visions. And we want our young © 
to see visions. If youth grows cynical society is doomed. — 
But as long as there are young hearts, like the lad Samuel’s, | 
sensitive to God and alertly responsive to His calling, we — 
need never despair of the world however sorry a condition — 





A-CHIED AS PROPHET 2a 


it has got into. ‘Their fresh consciences will come to its 
rescue, rising 1n vigorous protest against sins we have grown 
so used to that we do not heed them—old encrusted wrongs 
that seem to us a part of the very fabric of life. Age grows 
conservative, sedentary, sceptical. God renews the world 
with youth, ardent, adventurous, idealistic. We are saved 
by the darling young. 


My we ayy re 
feteas rah Je 


P 


ee aie by 















Saul, a choice young man, and a goodly: and there “was sn 
among the children of Israel a goodlier person than he. Stra axe 
a | 1, SAMUEL ix. Be cee 


Now the spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and pe eet ‘spi - 
from the Lord troubled him. 3 


XVI 
THE TRAGEDY OF SAUL 


OW are the mighty fallen!” That keynote 

of David’s lament finds echo in all our hearts as 
we read the pathetic tragedy of Israel’s first king. Here 
was a personality of dazzling splendour tumbled into ruin 
through uncontrollable derangement of the mind. 

When we first catch sight of Saul he stands without 
peer, a man of superb physique, head and shoulders above 
all others. He is of generous valour; he is pious and 
decent; he is honest and rigorously just. “The prophet 
Samuel, looking round for a national leader, has no doubt 
that Saul is worthy of the consecrating oil. Here was 
a man born to be king. 

Yet an early incident shows the mental excitability of 
Saul. On his way home from Ramah, where Samuel 
had anointed him, he met a band of “ prophets ’’—pro- 
fessional religious zealots rather like, perhaps, the Moslem 
dervishes—-and joined them in their wild music, their 
frantic ecstasy. It was an extraordinary thing for a man 
in his position to do—the son of a wealthy landowner 
associating with these fanatical men—and it provoked con- 
temptuous comment: much as if a prince in our country 
should suddenly join the Salvation Army, and beat out 
dithyrambic music in the streets, like Bernard Shaw’s 
professor in Adajor Barbara ; or throw in his lot with the 
Shakers and begin to emulate Meredith’s Fump-to-Glory 
Fane. Also, was it a healthy modesty, or was it, perhaps, a 


215 


216 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


trembling self-distrust, a premonition of instability, which 
made Saul, according to one of our narratives, hide himself 
away when the people wished to acclaim him king? 

However, all went well in the outset of his reign. It Is 
only after quarrel has broken out between himself and 
Samuel that mental disease begins to trouble him. What 
the cause of that quarrel was we cannot be sure; for here, as 
is so often the case with Old Testament history, we have 
variant accounts from different sources. All the passages 
which represent Samuel as loath to countenance a king in 
Israel must be eliminated from the story: they reflect 
the ideas of the Deuteronomic age, when Israel had suffered 
sad enough experience of kings to provoke doubt as to 
whether human kingship was compatible with the rule of 
God. In the original narrative of the monarchy Samuel 
has no scruples about establishing kingship. Similarly 
the story about Samuel denouncing and rejecting Saul 
because the latter had ventured to offer sacrifice in the 
prophet’s absence also reflects the ideas of a later age, and 
cannot be accepted as historical. A much more likely 
cause of their quarrel is the incident of the Amalekite 
war, when Saul had spared Agag in contradiction of Samuel’s 
fierce command. But, whatever the cause, tradition 
certainly told of a bitter quarrel between the aged prophet 
and his younger protégé. And Saul, being a man of reli- 
gious, even superstitious, temper, was disheartened and 
disturbed by the old prophet’s curse. 

He was scrupulous enough even to have sacrificed his 
son Jonathan for a trifling disobedience to a vow of which 
the young man was ignorant—so eager was he to preserve 
a loyal piety. Yet he found himself anathematized by 
the one man who stood forth as Yahweh’s oracle. And he 
did not well know why. He felt himself causelessly ill- 
used and deserted. He brooded and grew sullen, and 
recurrent fits of madness overtook him. Poor simple- 
minded man, bewildered with responsibilities he had never 


a 
~~ 


THE TRAGEDY OF SAUL B17 


sought, and forsaken by the prophet who had led him into 
them; trying to do his best, and yet always being told that 
he was wrong—that passionate, excitable mind of his turned 
in upon itself and grew clouded with doubt, with resent- 
ment, and at length with jealousy. For as he himself fell 
into disfavour, his young armour-bearer, David, the clever 
minstrel and heroic soldier, rose by leaps and bounds to 
universal popularity. His own children were never tired 
of sounding David’s praises. Michal was eager to marry 
him; Jonathan seemed willing to play second fiddle to 
him, and thus endanger his own heirship to the throne. 
Saul, one feels, was a man of magnanimous intention, but 
he needed the guidance of a stronger character and more 
politic intellect than his own; and he had it not. He was 
one of those men of splendid physique and engaging sim- 
plicity of heart who never grow beyond a rather boyish 
mentality, and are soon puzzled and abashed amid the 
conflict of affairs unless they have some astuter and more 
weighty brain to consult with : admirable executants, but 
blundering governors. And there was a strain of hysteria in 
him which developed more strongly the more he was thrust 
upon himself, the more he got into difficulty, the more he 
sank under the apparent disapproval of God. His temper 
grew suspicious and morose, till it broke into recurrent 
paroxysms of murderous frenzy. 

The pitiful memory of Saul reminds one of that poor 
old mad English king, George III. “Some slight lucid 
moments he had,” writes Thackeray, “in one of which 
the Queen, desiring to see him, entered the room, and found 
him singing a hymn, and accompanying himself at the 
harpischord. When he had finished he knelt down and 
prayed aloud for her, and then for his family, and then for 
the nation, concluding with a prayer for himself, that it 
might please God to avert his heavy calamity from him, 
but if not, to give him resignation to submit. He then 
burst into tears, and his reason again fled.” 


218 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


‘There is nothing so pitable as a mind deranged. Bodily 
disease can be a discipline from which the personality grows 
ever clearer and stronger, astonishing us with its courage 
and its grace; and we all see the truth in Stevenson’s 
aphorism that “‘ the truest health is to be able to do without 
it.” But in mental disease the very machinery of the moral 
nature is itself dislocated ; the self is deposed, and an inner 
anarchy prevails. ‘The purest natures may suddenly be 
loosened into wild crime, which they can control no more 
than one can control one’s dreams in sleep. Here 1 
humanity’s nightmare—this knowledge of complex forces 
in our mental make-up which may burst into rebellion, 
and perch some upstart parody of ourselves upon the throne 
of our individuality. “The amazing and abhorrent records 
of “secondary personalities’? make us all feel the possi- 
bility of psychic earthquake in our own natures,’ and we 
stand shuddering on the edge of “the abysmal deeps of 
personality.”” How are we to be sure of ourselves Hed a 
loving and dutiful girl like Mary Lamb can suddenly run 
amok and murder her helpless bed-ridden mother? Hers 
was a bright intellect and a virtuous character, yet these 
gifts did not save her from the perpetration of frightful 
deeds in her mania. Is there any picture more full of 
pathos than that of Charles and Mary Lamb, both in tears, 
wending their way to the asylum where she must again 
be left until the recurring symptoms of insanity had once 
more disappeared ? Charles Lamb’s heroic and self-effacing 
service of his sister, his unwearying tenderness, his faith 
in her and his efforts to engage her intellect in wholesome 
and beautiful employment, may indeed show us a pathway 
toward the curative treatment of insanity. “There will 
be no cure without love, and love’s infinite patience. Yet 
the unchancy and ghoulish horror of it remains. So slight 
a tilting of the scales, and the precariously: balanced self 
sinks into mad confusion! There may be, hope that our 
psychologists will dig to the roots of mental disease, and be 


& 
“ 
7 

a 
/ 





THE TRAGEDY OF SAUL 219 


able to safeguard us from it in the future by detecting and 
eliminating its causative elements in our subconsciousness. 
But meanwhile men seem to be the helpless prey of demonic 
forces against whose attack they have no armour. A 
Saul is overtaken by insanity in the midst of honest intent, 
without any deliberate cultivation of malice and devilry, 
through no apparent fault of his own: the pitiful victim 
of some hereditary weakness, some subtle defect in training, 
some unsuitability of circumstance: so complex is the 
tangle of life we share together, so dependent are we on 
myriad influences from the whole psychic atmosphere of 
the world, suffering inscrutably with and for each other, 
and awaiting for our safety the general social growth in 
wholesomeness and wisdom. 

Every individual has within himself a replica of the 
total good and evil forces that sway the history of mankind. 
Some unfortunate condition into which we are thrust may 
undermine the struggling authority of the inward good, and 
unseat the healthy reason. We are lucky if the blessing 
of a sound environment gives sufficient reinforcement 
to the good in us to keep sanity in the saddle. But no 
man can boast of his isolated strength to keep the true 
self intact. In our youth we are all dual personalities, 
and it is not our sheer will that determines the ultimate 
sane supremacy, though our will co-operates in the issue. 
“Is he we call a young man an individual—who 1s a pair 
of alternately kicking scales? If they wait for circum- 
stance, that steady fire will fuse into one,” says Meredith, 
‘the two men composing most of us at the outset of life ; 
but throttling is the custom between them, and we are used 
to see men of murdered halves. “These men have what 
they fought for: they are unaware of any guilt that may 
be charged against them, though they know that they do 
not embrace life.” “The sheer struggle of the will to make 
unity out of the inner duality may itself leave the nature 
pollarded and warped, the prey of strangled and yet living 


2.2.0 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


powers that lack their natural outlet, and break forth at 
last in some hideous distortion, unless a happy environment 
has given scope for rounded growth and harmonized the 
clashing desires in us. “The part played by the conscious 
will cannot, indeed, be underrated. The Jekyll-and-Hyde 
contest is fundamental. ‘The deliberate indulgence of our 
lower passions may develop a devilish self in us which at 
length ousts the better man in us altogether, and we may 
awake in horror to discover that we have created a Franken- 
stein which we cannot subdue—from which only some 
explosive conversion by the grace of God can deliver us. 
But the will does not act in a vacuum. Circumstance, 
too, has its part to play ; and without its happy help the 
purest will may reach victory only at a cost of such strait- 
jacketing of the nature as may leave many of its powers 
in smouldering rebellion, working unconscious evil, and 
plotting some future anarchy in us. The mind snaps with 
the strain of repression, and diabolism breaks forth in a 
personality seemingly secure; or the corruption of the 
“murdered halves” we carry in us enfeebles the mind to 
imbecility. So men suffer from the defects of their social 
inheritance, from the lack of right fellowship, and from 
the pressure upon them of untoward circumstance with 
which they have no power to cope. Weare all laying 
traps for one another in this world, and the innocent indi- 
vidual vicariously suffers from our general deficiency of 
good-will and clear wisdom. 

We are but on the threshold, yet, of psychological 
knowledge. Only dimly do we begin to perceive the 
subtle and far-reaching ramifications of the mind: its 
strange borderlands where distinct individualities seem 
to overlap and blend; the uncanny cellarages of the 
subconscious where alien belongings are stored. ‘The 
story of Saul gropes amid this mystery. In its open- 


ing incident we are face to face with the second-sight 


of Samuel: “The Lord had told Samuel in his ear 


THE TRAGEDY OF SAUL ape 


a day before Saul came, saying, ‘To-morrow about this 
time I will send thee a man out of the land of Benjamin.” 
Saul has been scouring the country for his lost herd of asses, 
and all his inquiry has been vain ; but Samuel is able to 
tell him, before he has mentioned his business, that the 
asses are found. Old history is full of such tales of second- 
sight, and modern research has sifted and classified them 
by the hundred. Depending as we do for all ordinary 
purposes upon our five senses, such tales provoke our scepti- 
cism. But our five senses are only the main high roads of 
our communication with the outer world. And how 
blocked and broken these often are! We have not the 
fiftieth part of the power of scent in a dog : he has evidence 
of innumerable things which our blunt noses never tell 
us of. And if our great main roads are half in disuse, we 
need not be surprised at our ignorance of many by-paths 
of communication upon which most of us never set foot 
at all. Life has other senses, other channels of mental 
communication, than those we are accustomed to. The 
homing instinct of the bird, the silent conversation of a 
colony of ants, are outstanding proofs of this, And in a 
world of such surprises we need not suppose that our every- 
day working consciousness exhausts our potential faculties— 
that there are not latent in us many senses as yet unexplored 
because we have no normal use for them. Weare fearfully 
and wonderfully made. 

And just as this unexplored penumbra of the human mind 
confronts us in the opening passages of the life of Saul, 
so again at its close we are face to face with our pathetic 
human questionings of these dim powers on our mental 
borderlands. ‘The belief in witchcraft is at once a recogni- 
tion of the fact of these indeterminate powers and a con- 
fession of our superstitious ignorance about them, Wizardry 
in various forms has held its place down the centuries because 
abnormal faculties of mind undeniably exist and subdue 
ordinary folk with astonishment wherever they are exercised; 


bee THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


> 


while, on the other hand, it has again and again been con- 
demned as dangerous and impious by sober minds because 
of a common-sense conviction that the Will of God is not 
to be discovered through any means so ill-understood and 
of such haphazard occurrence. “That Will is to be appre- 
hended by our universal and normal faculties of reason, 
heart and conscience, not by the mediumship of bizarre 
and freakish faculties in which average human nature has 
no share. But, when the conscience is clouded, and the 
reason weary and perplexed, and the heart hungry for com- 
fort, our poor human nature, catching at any straw, will 
turn to thaumaturgy and necromancy in the hope of finding 
in occult regions a revelation of the God it has failed to 
perceive through those normal powers that give us our 
dignity. Poor Saul makes his feverish journey to the 
witch of Endor, hoping to gain a verdict that will allay 
the dread suspicions that conscience and circumstance 
alike make obvious to him. Alas! the ghost of Samuel 
does but reiterate the threats and comminations of the 
living prophet, and echo every horrible presage that already 
filled Saul’s spirit with alarm. Well might he have said : 
‘“‘T need no ghost to come from the grave to tell me this 
Can he tell me no way of escape and recovery? Has he 
from his vantage-ground in the beyond, no message of 
mercy, nothing but the old preachment of doom and divine 
vindictiveness?’ “The voice of Samuel in the story is, 
indeed, a thoroughly earthly voice—a mere replica of the 
old Samuel, untouched by any higher insight such as one 
might have expected his disembodied life to give him : his 
God is still a fierce God thirsting for the blood of Amalek. 
And that seems to be the general character of such sup- 
posed communications from the dead: they merely reflect 
the standard of ideas current among those who inquire 
for them. Such communication may be possible ; it 


ill behoves a Christian with his faith in immortality and — 


the communication of saints to deny it ; and if it ever be — 


be 
= = 
Les ee 





















THROd RAGGEDY Oho SAUL 2233 


conclusively proved, it will open up a new region for science 
and add interest to our exploration of life. But it is doubt- 
ful if it can add anything to our religion. ‘The foundations 
of religion lie otherwhere than here. And the communica- 
tions of necromancy must do something better than merely 
reflect the current notions of the day before they can be 
accepted as authentic, as anything more than the reflections 
of the inquirers subconsciously flung upon the screen of 
the medium’s mind. It would be Jolly to talk with our 
dead friends ; but one would not expect them to tell us 
anything about God that we do not already perceive through 
Christ. At best they would but interestingly confirm the 
truth we know. And for those who hold the faith there 
is no real need for such confirmation: they cannot be 
surer than they are already of the love of God. While 
those who have it not will be building on a very shaky 
foundation if they rely upon sense-impressions instead of 
upon conscience. Christ’s warning holds good : “If they 
hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be per- 
suaded though one rose from the dead.” 

However, the incident with the witch of Endor is mainly 
significant to us, not for any light it can throw upon modern 
researches into the occult, for it is far too loosely narrated 
to be of any evidential value to us, but rather as giving evidence 
of the indestructible sense men have had of a strange border- 
land of mental experience, which they have been all too 
apt to regard with superstition. It completes the impression 
of weirdness that we receive from the whole life story of 
Saul. He moves bewildered through an uncanny world, 
brave as a lion to face any enemy of flesh and blood, but 
startled into fear, like an animal stalked by invisible hunters, 
with a sense of encompassing spiritual forces that he cannot 
understand. He goes into his last battle a doomed man. 
Principalities and powers are against him. His mind is 
full of gloom and terror. But at least he will die game. 
‘There is a sort of savage honour in the man as we glimpse 


aes THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


him in those closing moments on Gilboa—fighting to the 
last ditch, his army shattered, his sons lying dead, and at 
length, as the enemy press round to capture him, plunging 
his own sword into his breast with a final undishonoured 
acceptance of failure and the tomb. 

So we live out our puzzled and distracted lives in this 
labyrinthine world, fighting amid the mist and murk of 
our ignorance, played upon by inscrutable powers, and 
following each other, unvictorious, into the silence. 


We are such stuff as dreams are made of, 
And our little life is rounded with a sleep. 


Ah! the admirable bravery of mankind! so bewil- 
dered, yet so dauntless!_ Moving about in worlds not 
recognized, and yet holding the headship of all created 
things! By what is noble in itself let mankind judge 
life’s mysterious meaning. So much is dark about us: 
our own strength but a faint element in the majestic strength 
of nature ; our own knowledge but an infinitesimal frag- 
ment of the total truth of things. We are overwhelmed 
by the unsearchable strength and wisdom of Deity. 


Each faculty tasked 
To perceive Him, has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was asked. 


How shall we doubt, then, that our own love for each 
other is but a tiny spark over against the great fire of love 
in the heart of God? 


Do I find love so full in my nature, God’s ultimate gift, 


That I doubt His own love can compete with it? Here, the parts — 


shift ? 
Here, the creature surpass the Creator,—the end, what Began? 
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all this for man, 
And dare doubt He alone shall not help him, who yet alone can ? 


Saul had his friends in the hour of disaster. Human q 


love did all it could to save him. ‘Those men of Jabesh- 
Gilead, who owed him their freedom from days long 
gone by, did not forget their indebtedness, and they took 





THE TRAGEDY OF SAUL 225 


heroic risks to rescue his beloved body from the walls of 
Bethshan, where it shamefully hung, and to carry it home 
for noble burial. Was God’s love less urgent than theirs ? 
If they, in their impotence, risked all to snatch Saul’s body 
from shame, would not God make effort to redeem and restore 
the soul He created ? 
Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul the mistake, 
Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now,—and bid him awake 
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set 
Clear and safe in new light and new life-—a new harmony yet 
To be run, and continued, and ended—who knows ?—or endure ! 
The man taught enough, by life’s dream, of the rest to make sure ; 
By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss, 
And the next world’s reward and repose, by the struggles in this. 
Browning points us unerringly to a gospel by which to 
judge this tragic tale. We move through this world in a 
darkness where our minds stumble; we are perplexed on 
every hand; we cannot grasp and control half the powers 
that lurk without us or within; and our only earthly 
comforter is love. On that we fling our faith as a reflection 
of God Himself, however much our intellect gropes amid 
dark problems. We trust where we cannot trace. 
““Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst 
Thou—so wilt Thou!” God is not less good than those 
brave men of Gilead who went by night, for love’s sake, 
on their dangerous exploit to Bethshan. “’Tis our flesh 
that we seek in the Godhead!’ Our God Is revealed 
to us when we see Him asa man. And seeing Him thus, 
knowing that the love which makes for gladness and safety 
among us in this ill-understood world is His Spirit in us, 
we may hope for issue from our weakness, our madness and 
our despair. It is a tragic world, and we cannot pretend 
to an understanding of all its grim happenings. Only we 
do see operating within it a marvellously ameliorating and 
reconciling power of love which again and again brings 
light upon its darkness and healing upon its sores ; and so 
makes it possible for us to trust in an ultimate triumph of 


15 


2.26 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


love and an ultimate explanation of all things in its light 
which we shall awake to and be satisfied. In the midst 
of our bewilderments and woes we come upon the marvel 
of this blessed power, and we sit stilled and pacified before 
it, as the madman of Gadara sat before Christ, clothed and in 
his right mind, And we believe that here we face a power 
that is sovran, and will prove itself sovran at last against all 
our doubts. Blinded with tears, the world shall yet move 
out of its tribulation to meet Him who wipes all tears from 
our eyes ; and looking back on its strange earth-journeying 
shall see that all things have mysteriously worked together 
for good. ‘Blind from the prison-house, maimed from 
the battle, or mad from the tombs, their souls shall surely 
yet sit, astonished, at His feet who giveth peace.” 





ALL 


F, 


iy 


ora 
5 
a 


HE GIANT-KILLER | 











ees re ne ; : 

pyrene 

Ree a = ; 

ie 

es . 

‘, 

oe 

ie 

i And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man ; and 
t said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thin 


Thou art the man. 





ST adam at ar 
othe 





XVII 
THE DOWNFALL OF THE GIANT-KILLER 


ING DAVID had every quality that makes a man 

admirable to his acquaintances and an idol to the 
crowd. He had strength, beauty, talents, courage, address, 
chivalry, kindliness) He was as unassuming as he was 
audacious. And he had a signal genius for friendship, and 
the power to arouse impassioned loyalty. He was the 
Admirable Crichton of his age—warrior, bard and courtier 
in one: undeniably a most redoubtable, gifted and charming 
personality—a darling of the gods. 

In the memoirs of David’s court in 11, Samuel we have 
what is held to be one of the earliest pieces of historical 
narrative in the Old ‘Testament, written probably at no 
long period after the death of the hero it celebrates. But 
as regards some of the earlier passages of the life of David 
recorded in 1. Samuel there is less certainty, and the stories 
show the quality of folk-tale rather than of sober chronicle. 
‘Two contradictory accounts, for example, are rather 
clumsily woven together, concerning the circumstances 
of his first introduction to Saul. In the one—the far 
more probable one—he is already established at the royal 
court as Saul’s musician and armour-bearer at the time 
of the great battle with the Philistines ; in the other he 
comes upon the scene of battle as a raw youth straight from 
his father’s farm. Perhaps it was his resort to a shepherd’s 
sling as weapon—an act so unusual in a trained soldier— 
that misled the popular memory, and gave rise to the second 


version of the story But there is a further point in which 
229 


2.30 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


popular tradition has misled us. We need not doubt for 
a moment that David killed a giant, but he never killed 
Goliath of Gath. ‘There is a verse in 11. Samuel xxi. where 
the truth leaks out that Goliath of Gath, the staff of whose 
spear was like a weaver’s beam, was slain by one Elhanan. 
‘The giant whom David slew with his sling and stone was 
apparently nameless.” But it is too awkward to go on 
telling a yarn of this sort without giving a name to its 
characters, and so the name of poor Elhanan’s giant was 
bagged on behalf of David. It was quite too bad. But it 
is the way of the world: to him that hath shall be given. 
Elhanan was an obscure hero ; and so the popular verdict 
made no scruple about stripping him of his medals and pinning 
them on to the breast of David. ‘True, the later chronicler 
endeavours to make amends in a back-handed way by 
suggesting that it was Goliath’s brother that Elhanan slew. 
But this is poor justice! We must restore the good 
man to his rights. Why should the dim glories of our 
forgotten Elhanans be submerged and made tributary to 
the shining glories of our unforgotten Davids? Yet let 
Elhanan rest in peace. He is not devoid of honour. His 
name is but a variant of Johanan, otherwise John or Jack ; 
and all our nurseries know that it was Jack who was the 
Giant-killer. | 

David’s exploit with the nameless giant was anyhow a 
mighty one. And we may be sure that if old Elhanan 
looks upon us from the shades, he has enough of the hero 
in him to bear no grudge to David for stealing his particular 
giant; and has, no doubt, again and again generously 
enjoyed the brave excitement of all youngsters who from 
age to age have thrilled to hear that whop of the smooth 
stone as it caught the arrogant old Philistine between the 
eyebrows and felled him like a chopped oak. a 

Folk-tale has played its part, then, in touching up our 
history of David. But the outline of sound tradition is 
perfectly clear. He came as a young man to Saul’s court, 





DOWNFALL OF THE GIANI-KILLER 231 


and soothed the old king’s madness by his music and song, 
for which he won unrivalled fame in Israel. By a deed 
of astonishing prowess in single-handed duel with a huge 
Philistine he won national fame as a warrior, and rapidly 
advanced to the headship of the army. Saul quarrelled 
with him, and he was forced into outlawry, in which state 
he experienced many thrilling adventures, and brought off » 
many a daring coup, quite in the manner of Rob Roy— 
all the while maintaining a respectful deference to Saul 
himself, and holding the unbounded affection of the greater 
part of the populace. Despite his banishment, he remained 
the second most powerful man in the kingdom ; and at 
Saul’s death all southern Israel rallied at once to him and 
placed him on the throne. At first Abner, Saul’s captain, 
set up Ishbosheth as a rival king in the north; but this 
weakling quarrelled with Abner, who deserted to David 
and was treacherously slain by Joab. Ishbosheth himself 
was murdered soon afterwards, and David was left in un- 
disputed supremacy. 

It is a very romantic story. And David’s magnanimity 
stands out again and again. ‘There are two versions of 
the tale as to how he spared Saul’s life when he had the 
latter in his power, and we cannot be sure, therefore, of 
the exact incident. But the tenor of the tale, in whichever 
form we take it, is true to what we know of David else- 
where—in the later episodes, for example, of the murders of 
Abner and Ishbosheth. In the former case David could 
not afford to exact vengeance on the formidable Joab, but 
he openly expresses his indignant horror, and does the appro- 
priate funeral honours to Abner’s corpse, even to the com- 
posing of a dirge. In the case of Ishbosheth he has the 
murderers executed. [hese are the actions of a man of 
honour and loyalty. So is his slaying of the messenger who 
came trying to curry favour out of the news of Saul’s death— 
rough justice though that was; so is the lament in which 
he mourns for Saul, the honest grief of which wails down 


232 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


the ages ; so is that pathetic inquiry of his, as soon as he 
is seated on the throne, as to whether there is any yet left 
of the house of Saul that he may show the kindness of God 
unto him ; and his treatment of Mephibosheth, the lame 
son of Jonathan, whom he pensioned and took to live in 
his own court. 

We need in justice’to recall these very noble traits in the 
character of David, and to realize his essential honour and 
gentlemanliness, if we are to appreciate aright the horrible 
fall and dislocation of his character that was brought about 
by his lust for Bathsheba. David had the instincts of a 
man of honour and piety. He was no Borgia. And the 
horror of this incident of squalid intrigue and murder lies 
in the fact that so honourable and decent a man as David 
should be flung by a sudden wave of lust into so damnable 
a crime. 

The sex-morality of that day, with its plurality of wives 
and concubines, gave free rein to a man’s desires. “There 
was little training in self-restraint. But there was order, 
legality, and a certain mutual regard in these relationships. 
David was clearly a man of pretty inflammable tempera- 
ment; no thought of ascetic restraint ever entered his 
head ; and, no doubt, in his character of popular hero, 
plenty of women were ready to fling themselves at him. 
But he was fair-minded and generous in the ordinary dis- 
positions of his life, and in his normal senses he would have 
shrunk from that accursed treachery against Uriah. But 
Cupid goes blindfold. In the hot fit of passion even a 
noble nature will deceive itself with every sort of worthless 
excuse and subterfuge, unless it has been sternly disciplined 
in self-control. “There came a relaxed and indolent hour 
on his palace roof one summer afternoon when an unex- 
pected vision of bodily beauty gave play to the lust of his 
eyes. David lingered and gloated over it, not with the 
wholesome admiration of a continent and busy mind, but 
with the itch of desire that invades an empty, idle moment 


7 Sees 


DOWNFALL OF THE GIANT-KILLER 233 


when the will is slack and the conscience drowsy. He was 
in the reckless grip of lust before he knew it; and alas ! 
he had a king’s power of self-indulgence. Fulfilment was 
so easy. Probably most women would have counted his 
desire of them an honour. Anyhow, Bathsheba was not 
the woman to resist him. She had nothing of the heroic 
chastity which is attributed to the Shulamite in that rap- 
turous love drama, the Song of Songs. So the sin began, 
and engendered further sin: “the crime of lust became 
the crime of malice,” as is its wont. And David the mag- 
nanimous, David the splendid, dauntless and forgiving 
prince, became the base adulterer, the crafty, mean in- 
triguer, the cold murderer of a brave and loyal lieutenant. 
It is a dastardly tale, leaving a huge, indelible blot upon 

an otherwise noble life. But most men reflecting on it 
will say: “* There, but for the grace of God, go I.” 

Like a toad within a stone 

Seated while Time crumbles on ; 

Which sits there since the earth was curs’d 

For Man’s transgression at the first ; 

Which, living through all centuries, 

Not once has seen the sun arise ; 

Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, 

The earth’s whole summers have not warmed ; 

Which always—witherso the stone 

Be flung—sits there, deaf, blind, alone ;— 

Aye, and shall not be driven out 

Till that which shuts him round about 

Break at the very Master’s stroke, 

And the dust thereof vanish as smoke, 


And the seed of Man vanish as dust :— 
Even so within this world is Lust. 


That magnificent passage from Rossetti’s Fenny chills 
and sobers us all. We know how true is his figure of the 
loathsome toad lurking hidden within us, And it 1s whole- 
some for us to be reminded of it in such sombre and doomful 
words, But there is a gospel which Rossetti does not 
utter. He does not discriminate between the ineradicable 
physical desire, God-given in every man, and the uncontrolled 


2.34. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


fling of it upon selfish ends which turns it into sinful 
lust, toad-like and abominable. Desire remains eternal ; 
but the Master’s stroke may surely liberate it into whole- 
some sunshine without waiting for the pulverizing blow 
of death. It is a passion of tremendous power, likely to 
take the bit in its teeth and run away with us into ruinous 
disaster. But it is not damnable in itself. It becomes so 
only when we let it dethrone the reason and good-will in 
us, and so dwarf us beneath our proper stature of responsible 
manhood. ‘The wise old Kirstie in Weir of Hermiston 
sees the grace of God in it, even while she dreads, and pleads 
against, a thoughtless submission to the torrent of its power : 
‘““ Ay, Mr. Erchie, I ken the way o’ it—fine do I ken the 
way—how the grace o’ God takes them, like Paul of Tarsus, 
when they think it least, and drives the pair o’ them into a 
land which is like a dream, and the world and the folks 
in ’t are nae mair than clouds to the puir lassie, and heaven 
nae mair than windle-straes, if she can but pleesure him |” 
... “Kirstie,” said Archie hoarsely, “you have mis- 
judged me sorely. I have always thought of her, I would 
not harm her for the universe, my woman!” “Eh, 
lad, and that’s easy sayin’,” cried Kirstie, “ but it’s nane 
sae easy doin’?! Man, do ye no comprehend that it’s 
God’s wull we should be blendit and glamoured, and have 
nae command over our ain members at a time like that? 
My bairn, think o’ the puir lass! Have pity upon her, 
Erchie! And QO, be wise for twa!” 

Yes, God’s Will is in the natural passion, but it is in the 
moral forethought, too, which governs the passion to just 
and wholesome ends. Natural desire is of God and not of 
the devil, and we cannot annul it. If, Manichee-like, 
we look upon it as of the devil, and try to extirpate or sup- 
press it, we do but drive it into obscure corners of our nature, 
whence it works its subtle derangements upon us. But — 
if we see it as a power of God in us we can guide and liberate 
it into spiritual and open-hearted affections, making it a 


5.4 
ay 
2 
ber 
ae 
ont eae 


DOWNFALL OF THE GIANT-KILLER 2235 


sacrament of life to our salvation. We mortify its base 
growths only by vivifying its noble growths. We cast 
out lust by love alone. A morality of mere denial and 
suppression can never saye us in this matter. It is by the 
positive release and expansion of desire into channels of 
delicate and unselfish affection that lust is to be extirpated. 
We need to catch the glowing delights of love in the loyal 
wedding of a mate ; or, diffusedly, in the unselfish service 
of mankind, in friendship, in happy play with children, 
in all the eager pleasures of an alert imagination. Only 
when such delights are fully ours, and we are revelling in 
them, will lust appear to us the squalid and nasty perversion 
of all jolly desire that it really is. 


Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, 

But Lust’s effect is tempest after sun ; 

Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain, 
Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done ; 
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies ; 
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies. 


But no abstract statement of the truth—not even from 
Shakespeare’s lips—will convince us, unless we are feeling 
and enjoying the positive delights of a desire that has been 
lifted on to spiritual levels. Hence the enormous need 
of an environment which shall engage us all, and especially 
the young, with idealistic pursuits toward health, beauty 
and philanthropy. All too soon in youth we are given 
this heady steed of sexual passion to ride, and we are likely 
to be tumbled a good deal before we get the mastery. Suc- 
cess is no doubt furthered by the wholesome outlet of our 
energies, physical, imaginative, affectional—in sport and 
art and friendship. But we need more than this for security. 
We need the glowing admiration and awe of a great faith. 
For at best there will be an element of sheer battle now 
and then, of slaying and mortification ; and we are armoured 
for those fights only by a consuming love of God. But the 
more we vivify desire in generous and innocent ways, the 


2.36 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


less room will there be for temptation, the less need for 
pruning and mortifying its cancerous growths. 

Love is a spiritual coupling of two souls, 

So much more excellent as it least relates 

Unto the body; circular, eternal ; 

Not feign’d, or made, but born: and then, so precious, 

As nought. can value it but itself; so free, 

As nothing can command it but itself... . 

True love hath no unworthy thought, no light 

Loose unbecoming appetite, or strain ; 

But fixed, constant, pure, immutable. . 

The end of love is to have two made one 

In will, and in affection, that the minds 

Be first inoculated, not the bodies... . 

Nor do they trespass within bounds of pardon 

That giving way and license to their love, 

Divest him of his noblest ornaments, 

Which are his modesty and shamefacedness. 


Ben Jonson is thankworthy, like all the nobler poets, 
for keeping this positive ideal of pure love before our eyes, 
and filling our hearts with the sense of its enchantment. 
Flesh is a sweet thing. Bodily beauty is adorable. And 
the true poets have no qualms in making us realize the 
dearness of it. “Chey summon us to a frank and dancing 
world. And yet they make us see that all the glory and 
glamour of sense rots and withers unless it is held in con- 
tinent dignity and social honour. We owe a heavy debt 
to all those who help us toward a positive and vital ethic 
of sex. Our society is still too stuffy, too constrained, too 
prudish. Better, far better, this than a blowsy and in- 
delicate society. But the world of the future will be safer 
with less timidity. We shall be so full of continent health 
that Bathsheba will be able to take her bath without Tom 
Pry swelling with insubordinate lust in consequence. Some 
day we shall learn how frankly to admire without insult 
and to enjoy without grossness. A strong positive current 
of chaste delight will hold back the tides of selfish lust where 
all mere negative barriers of prudery have failed. We grow 
toward sanity. And there is a nobler race yet to be. 


ons 


DOWNFALL OF THE GIANT-KILLER 234 


But meanwhile we are in a world of sore strain and 
temptation, where lust continually riots, and brings its dingy 
tragedies before us day by day. Great ones succumb 
to it. Here is a giant which even the giant-killers fail 
to slay. It destroys men’s homes. It drags established 
honours through the mire. It saps the foundations of whole 
kingdoms. Sad, irrevocable ruin follows in its wake. How 
pathetic are the closing passages in David’s life, which began 
amid such brilliance! Fratricidal war and _ undutiful 
rebellion bring the old king with sorrow to the grave. We 
see him like Lear, “a poor, infirm, weak and despised old 
man,” going in flight from Jerusalem with the curses of 
Shimei ringing in his ears. For his own example in lust 
and murder had been followed up by lesser men, and chaos 
threatened the land ; just as Guinevere’s sin with Lancelot 
was followed by the sin of ‘Tristram and Isolt ; and others 
‘“‘drawing foul example from fair names, sinn’d also,” 
till the whole fair structure of King Arthur’s dream went 
toppling down to ruin. 

David was brought to penitence, indeed. We see him a 
broken, humbled man, ready to forgive all others because 
he cannot forgive himself. A very noble dignity shines 
out in his penitent old age. Weakened now, and weary, 
and broken-hearted, he is so forbearing, so patient and 
devout, that we love him in spite of his great crime. We 
feel that Uriah himself would pity and forgive that chastened 
spirit ; and we trust that somewhere in God’s world that 
forgiveness has been asked and granted. But there are sins 
which can never be remedied within the limits of this earthly 
life. No penitence of David’s could bring back Uriah 
from the grave. Penitence has a blessed, ameliorating 
force in this crime-burdened world ;~ but it does not enable 
us to cry quits to an irrevocable deed of evil. We are 
apt to estimate the cost of our amends too cheaply. Dick 
Shelton in the Black Arrow had stolen and wrecked the 
ship of the old skipper Arblaster, and killed some of his 


238 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


men into the bargain. Heisreallysorry ; and later on, when 
he is able to save the old skipper’s life, he eagerly does so 
in the fond hope that such an act will cancel out the old 
wrong completely. But Arblaster will not shake hands : 
‘“ Nay, let be. Y’ have played the devil with me, and let 
that content you.” ~ And poor Dick “for the first time 
began to understand the desperate game that we play in 
life, and how a thing once done is not to be changed or 
remedied by any penitence.” ‘That hard statement goes 
a bit beyond the truth, but it errs on the safe side. For- 
giveness is not easy to win, and demands a deeper penitence 
than most of us expect. But forgiveness is to be won, and 
forgiveness means that a thing once done is changed : there 
is a transmutation of all its natural effects. There is posi- 
tive gain brought out of loss. ‘There is “ for evil, so much 
good more.’”’ And such forgiveness is inseparable from 
penitence, and develops precisely according to the measure 
of penitence. Obviously, if we kill a man we cannot win 
his forgiveness in this world, and so the transformation of 
the wrong cannot be complete however deep our repentance. 
For it takes two to establish a forgiveness, the wronger and 
the wronged. But though there are many sins whose 
evil results cannot be wholly transmuted in this life, every 
step in penitence helps forward that transmutation. And 
we see enough of the miracle of cancelled wrong, even 
within the narrow limits of our human survey, to give us 
ground for faith that the grace of God is strong enough 
to bring, at last, all things to good issue. We believe in the 
forgiveness of sins. 

But sin costs very dear, and its effects are very stubborn 
to remove. Be sure our sins will find us out. And many 
a man will find here no scope for his repentance, though he 
seek for it with tears. Some such thought as this seems 
to underlie the message of the prophet Nathan. — He allows 


that David’s penitence must mitigate to some degree the — 


consequences of his sin, but the doom of it cannot be wholly 


DOWNFALL OF THE GIANT-KILLER © 239 


annulled. ‘The prophet is represented as foreseeing such 
doom in the death of the child born from the adulterous 
union. ‘The child did die, as undesired children born in 
shame and fear are most apt todo. But David could make 
amends in some measure, and labour to straighten out the 
sorry tangle as far as might be. And for the sake of his 
repentant efforts he should not be utterly crushed into ruin 
and irrevocable despair. 

The famous Fifty-first Psalm was assuredly not written 
by David, but it was not inappropriate for a later age to 
attribute it to him. For he was certainly a man sincere 
in his repentance, and he, for one, learnt the good news : 
‘““A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou shalt not 
despise’? ; he could even lay hold upon the hope that 
“Thou shalt wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.” 
There is an earlier psalm, the thirty-second, which some 
Biblical scholars have claimed with better reason to be, 
possibly, a composition of David’s. It strikes a note of - 
such cheerful escape from the sense of guilt that I find 
it hard myself to imagine David writing it. It is too 
exultant in its realization of a forgiveness fully demonstrated. 
But, whoever its author, it does very nobly proclaim the 
gladness of confession, the relief of unloading a deadly 
secret, and, by thus opening the road to amendment, winning 
back the foundations of self-respect. “* Blessed is the man 
whose transgression is forgiven, in whose spirit is no self- 
deceiving. While I kept silence, my bones waxed old 
through my complaining all the day long. For day and 
night Thy hand was heavy upon me. I acknowledged 
my sin unto Thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I 
said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord ; and 
Thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.” Something 
of that blessedness David no doubt felt, even though he did 
not arrive, perhaps, at so complacent a sense that all was 
well as the psalmist expresses. He did acknowledge his 
sin; and such confession is the beginning of all happy 
absolution, 


24.0 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


Well, here is the story of a good man’s crime in an 
hour when he was blinded by lust. It is easy to assume 
righteous indignation, and pour out a sneering scorn upon 
those who speak of David as “‘a man after God’s own 
heart.” He might well be called so in his houg of promise, 
aye, and in his hour of remorse. It were better for us to 
remember our Lord’s satiric thrust about the mote and 
the beam, lest we should be found the objects of some 
later Nathan’s parable, and should stagger before the 
accusing finger and the thundering word, “ ‘Thou art the 
man !” 


- 


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pas ; . o 
THE RIVAL ALTARS 





And Elijah came unto the people, and said, How long halt ye between 
two opinions ? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow 
him. And the people answered him not a word.... Then the 
fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, 
and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the 
trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and 
they said, The Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God. 

I, KINGS xvill. 21 3 38, 39. 


= 


XVIII 


THE RIVAL ALTARS 


HE death of the great king Solomon is reckoned 

with a fair measure of certainty to have taken place 
about the year 930 B.c. Some fifty years after that date, 
when Solomon’s empire had long since been broken up, 
and two beggarly little kingdoms in Palestine were all that 
remained of it, a man named Ahab ascended the throne 
of northern Israel. He was a brave soldier and an intelli- 
gent ruler, bent upon strengthening his kingdom against 
the encroachments of the Syrians from Damascus. ‘To this 
end he leagued himself with his neighbour, the king of 
Judah, fought successfully to maintain a suzerainty over 
Moab, and set up a new alliance by taking to wife the 
daughter of Ethbaal, King of Tyre. 

To a man of the world all this would seem sound policy. 
But the last step had its grave moral dangers. An inter- 
racial marriage would imply, in those days, a recognition 
of the gods of each race side by side. Ahab had no objec- 
tion to this. He had no intention of breaking from Israel’s 
traditional worship or persecuting its devotees. On the 
contrary, it is pointed out that he gave distinct recognition 
to the national faith in the names he chose for his children. 
But he was not a man of strong conscientiousness. And to 
him it seemed a trivial, harmless matter to give recognition 
to his wife’s religion, and build temples to Melcart, the 
Tyrian Baal, alongside the temples of Yahweh. In his 
eyes, as an unscrupulous man of the world, it was far more 


important to secure a political alliance with Tyre than to 
s 243 


24.4 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


avoid the moral risk of introducing among his people a 
sensual nature-worship quite antipathetic to the austere 
moral character of the old Israelite faith in Yahweh. 

So the foreign marriage was contracted, and Jezebel 
took up her residence in Ahab’s court at Samaria, or in 
the summer palace.at Jezreel. She was a proud, strong- 
minded woman who exerted all her influence firmly to 
establish the Baal-worship in her new home; and the 
easy-going Ahab was entirely willing to let her have her 
way. But the new queen, with her retinue of foreign 
priests, was not popular. And to one man at least in Ahab’s 
kingdom this introduction of an alien worship was an act 
of stark blasphemy against the Lord. 

For in the charming hill-country of Gilead, with its great 
sheep-walks, and its narrow gorges musical with mountain 
torrents, there was living Elijah—the primate among the 
great rollof Hebrew prophets. He was a wild, strange figure, 
a shaggy-red highlander, with cloak or striped blanket of 
camel’s hair, tied by a skin girdle, appearing here and there 
out of his solitude with startling suddenness—a very Dervish 
of the wilderness. An athletic man of tron physique, he 
could race a chariot across country. No city-dweller he, nor 
writer of books, like the prophets of a century later from 
Amos onwards. But he was a man of most passionate 
moral reflection, for whom—as his name implied— Yahweh, 
the Lord of Righteousness, was God, and He alone. And 
that intense conviction marks him as the father of the long 
line of prophets who made the religion of old Israel the 
foundation of the religion of all mankind. 

The biography of this redoubtable man, fragments of 
which are embedded in the Book of Kings, was written 
perhaps about the end of the ninth century B.c., not so 
very long after his death. But legend had already been 
at work, and the facts of his life-story are coloured with 
prodigy to a lavish degree. 

He appears to us with the utmost abruptness, announcing 


THE RIVAL ALTARS 24.5 
to King Ahab the approach of a drought: “ There shall 


not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.” 
We have independent evidence of a drought that overtook 
Palestine and Pheenicia during Ahab’s reign in the history 
of Menander of Ephesus, quoted by Josephus. According 
to Menander it lasted a twelvemonth. Our Old Testa- 
ment author implies a rather longer period, but not three 
years, as is often supposed. “Ihe mention of rain coming 
again “‘in the third year”’ implies no more than that a full 
twelvemonth and a bit more had intervened—a period, 
probably, from the “latter rains”? of one spring to the 
‘former rains”’ of the next autumn but one. In other 
words, one exceptionally dry year had gone by, during 
which both the customary rainy seasons had failed. “The 
summer months in Palestine are normally quite rainless, 
and the country depends for its moisture on the dew and 
occasional night mists. In our story even these are said 
to fail, as well as the autumn and spring rains. 

During this drought, which Elijah, by a bit of acute 
meteorological judgment or maybe by some touch of second 
sight, had foretold, he betook himself to the brook Cherith— 
an unknown site, probably in his native country of Gilead. 
And here, we are told, he was fed from day to day by ravens. 
In the story of Gideon we read of two Arab princes named 
Oreb and Zeeb, the Raven and the Wolf; hence it has 
been argued that the ravens that fed Elijah were the wander- 
ing Arabs near whom he pitched his hermitage. Or, again, 
it is suggested that the word “ oreb”’ may be a mistake for 
“* Arab.”’? ‘This rationalization gives a plausible origin for 
our story. But doubtless the chronicler was in good faith 
recording a miraculous tradition as it had come down to 
him, and he would not have been interested in the episode 
if he had not supposed it to be supernatural in character. 

However, the brook Cherith dries up after a while, and 
Elijah is driven to Zarephath in Phoenicia. He is still 
in the famine area, and still needs to be miraculously 


246 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


sustained. So we have the graceful story of the poor, kindly 
widow who, as a reward for her hospitality to the prophet, 
finds her barrel of meal and her cruse of oil never failing 
through all the bitter months of drought. But this is 
an unaccountable story quite apart from the miracle. ‘The 
kind widow of Zarephath, one must suppose, was a worship- 
per of the false Tyrian Baal, whose advent into Israel was, 
in Elijah’s view, the cause of the merciless drought that 
had fallen on the country. Why should Elijah take refuge 
in the very district whose deity was his pet aversion : sent 
there, too, by the promptings of his own God? It seems 
impossible to disentangle the actual facts and motives of the 
story. Some would suggest that we have here a hint of 
Elijah’s real religious standpoint. ‘“Uhe Baal might properly 
be worshipped in his own land; but Israel was not his 
land. He was an intruder there, usurping the rights of 
Yahweh. Every god to his own country, and no tres- 
passing ! Such a religious point of view was quite cus- 
tomary before a true monotheism began to prevail in men’s 
minds. And yet Elijah himself openly worships the God 
of Israel in this foreign town, and apparently converts his 
hostess to the same worship. And certainly when we meet 
him next in the great scene on Carmel he speaks with utter 
contempt of the rival god, not in the language of a man 
who recognizes other gods than Yahweh, each in his own 
domain. Can he have gone to Zarephath to inform himself 
at first hand of the real character of this Baal worship, and to 
return at length all the more furiously determined to chal- 
lenge the priests of this immoral cult? “That was, at least, 
the effect of his sojourn. On Carmel he speaks as the 
pure monotheist for whom there is but one true God in 
the universe, and all other deities are but figments of human 
imagination. 

At length the second autumn is approaching, and the 
word of the Lord comes to Elijah, saying, ‘‘ Go, show thyself 
unto Ahab ; and I will send rain upon the earth.” So he 


THE RIVAL ALTARS 247 


travels southward and, on drawing near Samaria, finds 
Obadiah, the king’s steward, anxiously scouring the country 
for any bit of pasturage still remaining, that he may bring 
back a promise of fodder for the royal stables. Obadiah is a 
good friend to Elijah, and a loyal supporter of the true 
faith. Already he has risked his life to save those of a 
school of prophets whom Jezebel had sought to massacre, 
Evidently, then, the religious feud had reached a crisis 
in Elijah’s absence, and the news of this may have been 
the real cause of his return to make his daring challenge 
and bring things once and for all to a settlement. 

Obadiah is persuaded to announce Elijah’s return to 
Ahab, and king and prophet confront each other again. 
One would like to know more of their interview. But 
we are told only of its upshot, which seems to have been 
that Eli won permission from Ahab to rebuild the neglected 
altar of Yahweh on Carmel, so that the two faiths might 
contend there side by side until the true God showed forth 
his power in evident blessing. 

Carmel was a fair and appropriate arena for such a con- 
test of faiths, for it was sacred both to the Jew and to the 
Phoenician, and had belonged to them in turn at different 
periods. It had been a sanctuary from time Iimmemorial— 
a natural “‘ high-place”’ for worship, being the one great 
headland that breaks the flat monotony of the coastline ; 
and as its name of “the Garden” implies, it was flanked 
with rich vegetation, being the first spot in the country 
to catch the rains from westward. 

The story of this battle of faiths is dramatized with superb 
force by the old historian. He represents it as a deliberately 
arranged duel in the presence of the whole populace, 
gathered there on the sacred hill to watch the issue. Each 
party was to prepare a sacrifice and “ the God that answereth 
by fire, let him be God.” All day long under the sweltering 
sun the priests of Baal cry upon their god, gashing their 
bodies in frenzy as the hours wear on and no answer comes, 


248 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


while Elijah taunts them with contemptuous mockery. 
With the drawing in of the evening there is a silence of 
despairing failure at Baal’s altar, while Elijah steps forward 
to his task, repairs the altar of the Lord that had fallen 
to decay, loads it with his sacrifice, and drenches it with 
water (whence procured in this appalling drought we are 
not told: but there would be open springs on Carmel, if 
anywhere) ; and then he falls to prayer. “Vhere is a hush 
of awe upon the scene as Elijah prays, in vivid contrast 
with the noisy bellowings of his opponents. “The quietness 
of a great trust creeps over the story. “Then with a piercing 
flash the lightning falls; the altar is aflame with fire ; 
not only the sacrifice, but the very stones and dust are con- 
sumed ; and forthwith the hill-side echoes with a great shout, 
*“* Yahweh, he is the God ; Yahweh, he is the God !” 

It is a tremendous scene—so magnificently written that 
no critical analysis can rob it of its impressive awe for all 
future time. But every one must recognize that without 
question we are dealing here with legend ; and the curious 
intellect is eager to probe it and uncover its factual basis. 
And it is not difficult to make a shrewd guess at the possible 
facts underlying this noble romance. 

Carmel was a double sanctuary: on its summit there 
had been, in use or disuse for ages past, altars both to Yahweh 
and the Tyrian Baal. For Carmel stood practically at 
the boundary of the two kingdoms, and its ownership had 
often been in dispute. If, amid Jezebel’s innovations, the 
altar of Yahweh had fallen into disuse and ruin, Elijah 
could have made no more significant challenge than to 
claim the right to rebuild it and resume the sacrifices there. 
This would not necessarily have taken place amid a huge 
concourse of people summoned for the purpose, though it 
was doubtless done openly, and must have attracted much 
attention ; and the king himself may have been persuaded 
to patronize the renewed sacrifices with his presence. We 
may presume that the two rival cults were thus being carried 


THE RIVAL ALTARS 249 


on side by side, while Elijah waited and prayed for the 
promised rain. At last the clouds gather over the sea ; 
the storm rolls up; and a flash of lightning strikes down 
on Elijah’s altar, As may be seen from the story in 
11. Chronicles vil., where the altar in Solomon’s new temple 
is said to have been similarly struck by fire from heaven, and 
from other parallel tales, this fall of lightning was always 
thought of as a certain sign of divine acceptance and con- 
secration. If such an event happened, therefore, all the 
necessary elements were at once to hand for writing up 
the whole story in the form in which we have it in our 
Bibles. “The actual sequence of facts may be presumed 
to have been as follows : (1) a year of drought, for which 
Elijah in his public preaching throws the blame upon Ahab’s 
introduction of a foreign cult ; (2) the prophet is driven 
into hiding by Jezebel’s anger and her increasingly dangerous 
influence ; (3) after some months he returns and boldly 
claims to reinstate the Lord’s altar on Carmel, where the 
opposing altar of the Baal was now flourishing ; (4) shortly 
afterwards the drought breaks up with a terrific storm, 
during which Elijah’s altar is struck by lightning ; (5) this 
remarkable incident coinciding with the break up of the 
drought is taken as an evident sign of the power of Yahweh ; 
the compromising populace suddenly swings over to Elijah’s 
side, and a furious massacre of the priests of Baal takes 
place in consequence. It was easy for such a sequence of 
events quickly to have developed in the popular imagina- 
tion into the one set day of challenge between Elijah and 
the Phoenician priests, with the lightning falling from heaven 
as a direct answer to his prayer ; while his anxious expecta- 
tion of the rain-cloud, which must have preceded the lightning 
flash, is recorded as an epilogue to impress the lesson that 
the divine blessing of the rain came as a reward for the 
re-establishment of the true faith. 

In such way we may read between the lines of the Bible 
narrative and detect there a genuine history of Elijah’s 


2.50 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


courageous witness on behalf of his God. His re-erection 
of the Lord’s altar was a bold challenge to the innovating 
religion ; and if fortunate accident helped to decide the 
issue in his favour, nevertheless it was his moral passion and 
energy which brought to the point of decision the question 
as to whether Israel~could safely tolerate this foreign cult. 
Elijah saw that the two faiths were mutually exclusive ; and 
he was right. 

For what was this Baal worship? Baal is a generic 
name for all the local deities of old Canaan. Various 
districts had each its own distinct Baal. But they were 
all alike in essential idea. “Dhe Baal was always a nature- 
deity, the lord of the soil; or, more accurately, the lord 
of the waters—the streams and springs—that fertilized 
the soil of any particular stretch of country. He was the 
fertilizing agent which made a favoured valley or stretch 
of moorland richer in its yield than other parts. He was 
the source, then, of corn and wine and oil. And hence, 
too, the cause of fruitfulness in cattle and in men. He was 
the lord of all reproductive life. And the common conse- 
quence of such modes of thought was that all these Baal 
cults were full of sensual observances. ‘heir worship 
sanctioned and required the sacrifice of chastity. Prostitu- 
tion and even worse vices were associated with a man’s 
religious duties. And more than that : the god who brought 
offspring must needs be honoured with the first-fruits thereof, 
not only of corn and cattle, but of humankind. And so 
the cruel devilry of child-sacrifice was a common feature 
in these nature-religions. Now the Israelites, as we know 
from so many Bible references, had been constantly in danger 
of sinking back into these old Canaanitish rites, which 
were maintained among all their neighbours. But the 
ringing appeal of the faith of Yahweh was toward a moral 
worship, the worship of a God who spoke in conscience, 
and not in mere bodily instinct, a God who stood for character 
and spiritual power, and demanded from men the rational 


LHE RIVAL ALTARS 251 


worship of moral effort as against the base superstition 
of magic rites of fertility. ‘“‘ What doth the Lord require 
of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to es 
humbly with thy God?” 

Probably the Baal worship had never been horavahie 
banished from Israel, and had lingered side by side with 
the nobler spiritual ated of the Seed. But the arrival 
of Jezebel and her swarms of foreign priests had brought 
matters to a crisis. One or other faith must definitely go 
under. ‘The attempt to mingle them would inevitably 
mean that the higher and more exacting religion would 
be swamped. It was Elyah’s unforgettable distinction 
that he realized this, and with intense moral energy gave 
battle to the insidious encroachments of the heathen cult. 
He would tolerate no compromise. ‘‘ How long halt ye 
between two opinions?”—that was undoubtedly the 
burden of his preaching. ‘The time had come for Israel to 
reach a final decision. 

Once to every man and nation 

Comes the moment to decide, 

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, 
For the good or evil side. 

Israel’s hour of crisis had now struck ; and Elijah preached 
for a decision, as the great evangelists, burdened with a 
horror of sin, have always done. He preached as Savonarola 
or Wesley preached, and his burning earnestness won the 
decision he wanted: the faith in a God of Righteousness 
was preserved. It was not an absolute and final victory : 
it never is. “Che danger returned again and again. But 
Elijah had lit a torch in Israel which could never be put 
out. And from his day onward—for the next four hundred 
years in almost constant sequence, and then perhaps with 
less frequency and power, but never wholly dying away until 
its final consummation in that John of the Desert who 
heralded the Christ—the voice of exalted prophecy was 
never lost to Israel ; and the faith ina God of Righteousness 
became.an indelible conviction, ultimately spreading from 


252 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


Israel with the rise of Christendom, and living still to win 
the world. 

In this agelong religious advance the strange, wild 
figure of Elijah must always bear an honoured place. It 
was no fanatic and crotchety squabble about rival rituals 
in which he fought, but a struggle of world-wide import 
between a concept of deity based on the wonder of natural 
fertility and bodily instinct, and a concept of deity based on 
the deeper wonder of the moral sense. God is what ? That 
is the eternal question. And Elijah won his battle with 
the answer : God is the Eternal that loveth righteousness. 

Because of that historic struggle, recorded with such 
dramatic splendour in the Book of Kings, we look back 
to Carmel almost as to a second Sinai. On Sinai was this 
religion of the Lord of Righteousness first formally pro- 
mulgated as the national faith, and established in code and 
covenant through the genius of Moses ; on Carmel it was 
rescued from destruction and born anew. Moses initiated 
the movement which built a notable nation out of a herd 
of slaves by giving them a faith and welding them into a 
church—a nation whose power culminated in the golden 
days of David and Solomon. Elijah initiated the movement 
which resurrected the church from the ruins of the nation, 
preserving through weal and woe a faithful, though often 
martyred, people, from among whom at last there sprang 
up the new world of Christendom. It was meet that in 
our Lord’s transfigurement on Hermon the spirits of Moses 
and Elijah should commune with Him. ‘The world was 
at that hour once again at the cross-roads ; and He who 
was to fix its future line of development drank inspiration 
from the two great forerunners who had been its guides. 
at the most decisive turning-points in the past. In the 
old dispensation no figures stand out with a grandeur com- 
parable to that which invests Moses and Elijah as they are 
figured by the wondering imagination of after ages. They 
are the moral ‘Titans of old Israel—the men who affirmed 
and reaffirmed in the midst of her the Everlasting Yea. 


XIX 
A STILL SMALL VOICE 










And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong one 
the mountains, and break in pieces the rocks before the Lord ; but 
Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake ; but t t 
Lord was not in the earthquake ; and after the earthquake a fire ; ; but 
the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. — 


1, Kines xix. 11, 12. — 


XIX 
A STILL SMALL VOICE 


'HERE is a fine imaginative passage in Carlyle’s 
Sartor Resartus where he pictures “‘Teufelsdréckh 
standing one summer midnight on the cliffs of the North 
Cape, gazing out across the Polar Sea where the midnight 
sun hangs low and hazy. He is utterly alone: no living 
thing is about him ; only “the granite cliffs ruddy-tinged, 
and the peaceable gurgle of that slow-heaving Polar Ocean.” 
“In such moments,” he says, “solitude is invaluable, for 
who would speak or be looked on, when behind him lies 
all Europe and Africa, fast asleep, except the watchmen ; 
and before him the silent Immensity, and Palace of the 
Eternal, whereof our Sun is but a porch-lamp ? ” 

Beside that picture of Teufelsdréckh at thesNorth Cape 
we may put this other picture of uttermost solitude—Elijah 
alone in the mountain fastnesses of Sinai. Here, too, were 
granite cliffs ruddy-tinged, more sublime in height by 
far, and more shuddering in their precipitous descents, than 
the cliffs of Norway ; and at their roots the coral-strewn 
beaches of the tropical sea. Sinai stands up like the centre- 
piece of the earth, at the junction of three continents ; 
its inviolability guarded by great deserts; a sanctuary of 
naked rock and air, the home of an intense silence. And 
Elijah is there alone, crouched at a cave entry—one man 
in awful solitude waiting upon God; while “the million- 
peopled cities vast’ of the habitable earth lie far beneath 
and far beyond the desert horizons, dwarfed to mere human 


255 


256 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


ant-hills in the imagination of this solitary watcher on the 
peaks. 

Elijah’s dramatic victory over the prophets of Baal, 
though its real effects were mighty and permanent, appeared 
for the moment quite abortive. It had roused the queen 
to vigorous counter-action, and Elijah had to flee for his 
life. He had crossed into Judah, and pressed southward 
to the old limit of the land at Beersheba, where he had left 
his servant, and plunged alone into the desert. For the 
moment he seemed like a broken man, eager to be done 
with this toilsome and desperate world: “It is enough ; 
now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better 
than my fathers.” It is the voice of a man unnerved and 
utterly weary. The immense spiritual excitement of his 
struggle for the true faith had left him prostrate. He 
lies down under a bush of broom in some desert wady, as 
the Arabs are wont to do for a midday rest—this bush 
affording often the only shade available. And there he 
sleeps, perhaps hoping, or even intending, to lie there till 
death gave him his release. But heisawakened. An angel 
touched him, and bade him rise and eat, offering him bread 
and water. Some passing wanderer, maybe, thus found 
him and succoured him; for the word “angel” has a 
very loose connotation, and may refer to anyone or anything 
that appears to bring divine help. How long he had lain 
there we are not told—perhaps for days. For the story 
seems to Imply that Elijah was really seeking suicide. He 
was probably found fainting and half-dead by this kindly 
traveller, who, reviving him with food and tendance, made a 
new man of him again, and so proved himself veritably 
an angel of God—the means through which Elijah’s suicidal 
despair was banished and a new sense of providential calling 
given to him. It could not be by accident that the stranger 
had thus found him lying like a corpse in the desert solitude. 
God’s hand was in the event. This man was God’s messen- 
ger, telling him, more clearly than words could tell, that 


A STILL SMALL VOICE 259 


it was not God’s Will for him yet to die. He was still 
needed. ‘There was still work to be done. ‘The cause 
was not lost. He had not thought to awake again to this 
world’s interests and duties. But God had intervened 
and sent His messenger to revive him. A clearer evidence 
of the Divine Will could not be forthcoming, and Elijah 
accepts it as such. If ever afterwards he was asked where 
this unlooked-for stranger came from, he could but say 
with deep conviction: ‘“‘ God sent him; he was God’s 
angel to me ; that is all I know,” 

So Elijah is awake again with the world about him, and 
the tide of his own energy returning as sleep and food work 
their beneficent miracles in his body. But what is he to 
do? ‘That is by no means clear. He is ready to accept 
God’s orders, but he must first find out what these are. 
He must wait for guidance. And where would he be most 
likely to get it? He was only a few days’ journey—“ forty 
days”? is merely a routine phrase here—from Sinai, the 
holiest of holy spots, the very sanctuary of God, where 
Moses had received of old that Law which was the heart 
of divine revelation for Israel, when he went up into the thick 
darkness where God was. What could Elijah do better 
than follow in Moses’ steps, and listen for God’s voice 
on the awful Mount? 

So to Sinai he travels in subdued wonder and eagerness 
—a man reclaimed from death—and finds lodging in a cave 
there amid the granite cliffs. So went St. Paul to Arabia 
after the tumult of his conversion, until, through meditation 
in that still retreat, God’s purpose for him in the future 
should be made clear. So went our Lord into the wilder- 
ness after baptism, before he could feel equipped for public 
ministry. And so Mohammed retired to his cave in the 
hills near Mecca till revelation came to him and thrust 
him forth as God’s prophet. So men have always sought 
in retreat and silence, in meditation and passivity, those 
deeper and clearer indications of God’s Will toward them 


ig wae 


258 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


that they were hungering after. ‘The instinct for retreat 
is ineradicable among serious and prayerful folk. We need 
respite from society with all its incessant practical demands, 
that the soul may be alone with God, and take stock of 
itself and its destiny. Only out of the quietness of such 
withdrawal do men.return to society again with new vision 
and resolve. It is in the silence that we win power for 
effective duty in the bustling world. 

So Elijah dwells awhile in his mountain cave, meditating, 
looking before and after, waiting till his shadowy, wavering 
thoughts and purposes are focused into a clear ray of burn- 
ing conviction, waiting for God’s voice. 

At first the voice is but a query, bidding him search 
himself : What doest thou here, Elijah? What motives 
have drawn you hither? Is it offended pride, or a vague 
purpose of vengeance? Is it any self-regarding motive 
at all? Or is it a genuine desire to listen only for God’s 
command, and do only His Will? We are so easily self- 
deceived. Our selfishness so subtly disguises itself under a 
cloak of seeming piety or philanthropy. And so the first 
step in waiting upon God is always self-examination, the 
uncovering of our innermost heart, the laying ourselves 
naked before God’s eye. His Spirit cannot breathe itself 
into us while we are preoccupied with motives of our 
own, ‘The soul must first be swept clear by confession; 
What doest thou here, Elijah ? Examine yourself ; review 
your life; face the facts, facts without and facts within 5 
know yourself ; and then, when all subterfuge, all subtle 
hypocrisy, all self-delusion is done away, the ear may at 
length be open to hear the voice, not of your own will, but 
of God’s. 

And Elijah does thus review his life. He can honestly 
claim that he has been very jealous for the Lord God of 
Hosts. It was a genuine moral passion that had prompted 
his crusade. His heart was really sore and burdened at 
his people’s apostasy. It is with no pique of selfish pride 


4 STILL SMALL VOICE 259 


but with genuine concern for righteousness, that he has 
struggled against their forsaking of the covenant, their 
overthrow of the altars, their massacre of the prophets. 
He can take his stand before God so far with the stubborn 
confidence of a good intent: I have done this; was it 
not well done? And now where has it carried me? I, > 
even I only, am left ; and they seek my life to take it away. 
‘That is why I am here. ‘That is the honest truth about 
myself. And what is to be the next step? I wait for 
guidance. 

There is a rather strikingly close parallel to this in 
Ruskin’s words in Fors Clavigera. He also had been 
carrying on a prophetic crusade, and now, at less than sixty 
years, seemed old, broken and alone. ‘‘ What am I,” he 
writes, “‘'to claim leadership, infirm and old? But I have 
found no other man in England, none in Europe, ready to 
receive it, Such as I am, to my own amazement, I stand 
—so far as I can discern—alone in conviction, 1n hope, and 
in resolution, in the wilderness of this modern world.” 
That is the egoism of devotedness—the last infirmity of 
prophetic minds. 

Elijah had told the truth about himself. The man’s 
intent was altogether good. No voice came to upbraid 
him on that ground. And yet there were truths for him 
to learn under God’s wise and gentle tuition: a lesson of 
patience and a lesson of hope. He had fought for God, 
but he had not adequately trusted God. He had tried 
to be God’s champion. Well and honestly done! . But 
had he not a little exaggerated his importance? Had he 
not felt that his failure was God’s failure? Had he not 
almost usurped God’s place, and felt that the battle of God 
was lost because, forsooth, he himself had had a rebuff? 
Was God really quite so helpless without his eager champion 
ship? Had not Elijah, in the very fervour of his self- 
devotion, overlooked the fact that God had a few others in 
Israel whom He could also rely upon? And had he not, 


260 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


with his impetuous temper, rather missed seeing the secret 
of God’s rule with men—that large, unhasting, secure 
dominion that will not win its way by angry force, and can 
afford to meet apparent defeats just because it is so sure 
of itself? Elijah had swooped like a whirlwind upon the 
heathen idolaters, and his victory over them was as momentary 
as the passing of a whirlwind. He had thought to win 
God’s battle in a day, and to win it for ever. Not thus, 
not thus! The fight is a bigger one than Elijah realized ; 
his own tussle, but one little event in an agelong campaign. 
And the Lord God, ‘to whom a thousand years are as one 
day, is a God long-suffering and patient, with the meekness 
of assured power, of absolute resolve. Elijah had had 
faith enough for action. Let him now learn the profounder 
faith needed for patience. He has eagerly fought for 
God. Let him now learn that God fights His own cause 
in His own way—demanding our faithful help indeed, but 
often along lines we should neither have chosen nor con- 
ceived for ourselves ; and it is ours to trust where we cannot 
trace. 

And this gradual tuition of Elijah’s spirit is symbolized 
in the noble passage that follows Elijah’s protesting con- 
fession. “The word of the Lord said, Go forth, and 
stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the 
Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the moun- 
tains, and break in pieces the rocks before the Lord ; but 
the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind, an 
earthquake ; but the Lord was not in the earthquake ; 
and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in 
the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.” The storm 
that broke over the mountains with its flashing forks of 
lightning must have vividly reminded Elijah of the recent 
similar scene on Carmel; and must have quickened to 
the utmost his expectation of a divine message ; for had not 
God spoken to Moses amid thunders? And was not 
Yahweh a God who rode upon the thunder-clouds, as the 


4A STILL SMALL VOICE ee 


psalmist said—the thunder itself His voice, symbol of His 
almighty power as Master and Judge? ‘“* The voice of 
the Lord is upon the waters : the God of glory thundereth : 
the voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon: He 
maketh the hills to skip like calves ; the voice of the Lord 
divideth the flames of fire: the voice of the Lord shaketh 
the wilderness.” So the old psalmist pictured the storm 
sweeping from Lebanon in the north to Kadesh in the south 3 
hearing in every crash of thunder that made the very hills 
tremble and lit them with dividing forks of fire, nothing 
but the voice of the Almighty. “Thus Elijah, caught in 
his cave on Sinai by this terrific storm which interrupts 
his meditations, conceives that perhaps, in the exaltation 
of standing amid this battle of the elements, the message 
he is waiting for will strike upon his ear. He goes to 
the mouth of the cave and watches the lurid scene—the 
clouds wrapping him around like battle-smoke, the thunder 
bursting appallingly about his head, the rocks splintering 
and crashing into the hidden valleys beneath his feet, the 
wild hurricane screaming with maniac fury across the 
bleak summits. Here was every evidence of superhuman 
power. How gloriously mighty was the God whom he 
served, the God who wielded these prodigious weapons ! 
He is roused, expectant, excited. But neither in the shrill 
voice of the whirling blast, nor in the crack of the fire- 
bolts, nor in the roar of shattered rock, does any clear message 
come to him from God. ‘These things do but tell him of 
God’s awful might, which he knew already; of God’s 
wrath in judgment, which his own stern, relentless temper 
already reflected, perhaps with an improper emphasis. 
But there was no new vision of faith or duty here. ‘The 
Lord was not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor the 
fire—not present there in any freshly impressive way which 
would bring home new truth to Elijah’s soul. 

And then, at last, the storm ceases. An unearthly ~ 
silence falls. “The sky sweeps clear, and the drenched 


2.62 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


ground lies bare beneath the enormous heavens again. 
Not a bird is on those heights; not a stirring leaf in all 
the barren waste; no sound of rushing waters. But 
Elijah heard the silence for a little space—the acute tingling 
silence of those arid mountain-tops in utter calm. “ And 
after the fire a sound of gentle stillness.”” More marvellous 
than all the tempestuous havoc of the storm was that in- 
finite stillness, that utter motionless rest, that dignity of 
imperturbable silence. “There was something here more 
awful, more holy than the huge titanic riot of the hurri- 
cane ; and something sweeter, something that soothed and 
strengthened his heart. In the storm he could marvel at 
and praise God’s power, His majesty in terrible judgment. 
But in this quietness he felt God drawing nigh, companion- 
able, communicative, a whispering Presence by his side, 
a still small voice. ‘‘ And it was so, when Elijah heard it, 
he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went forth.” 

Stillness! “The silence that is in the starry sky, the 
sleep that is among the lonely hills”! Nota bird twittered, 
not a leaf fluttered, not a pebble stirred. And the silence 
wins the heart of the old prophet into a great passivity. 


Silent Spirit! dwell with me, 

I myself would quiet be, 

Quiet as the growing blade, 

Which through earth its way hath made 
Silently, like morning light, 

Putting mists and chills to flight. 


‘The mists of Elijah’s soul are dispelled now ; his chill 
despairs vanish away. He hears the message at last. Again 
the challenge echoes in the ear of his spirit: ‘‘ What doest 
thou here, Elijah?” And again he recites the record 
of his lonely stand for God, but this time—may we not 
think f—not with any querulous ring in his voice as of 
a man complaining of betrayal, but rather with a note of 
hope as of one assured of reinforcement and ready for 
further summonses, And the summons is not delayed. 


AOSTILL: SMALL VOICE: 263 


He receives a commission which is at once to further his 
work and to dismiss him from duty. ‘‘ Go, and return on 
thy way to the wilderness of Damascus ”’—a foreign land. 
And there? “ Anoint the men who shall succeed you. 
And understand that there are yet many knees in Israel 
that have not bowed to Baal, many lips that have not kissed 
him.” 

It was a humbling commission, and yet a fortifying 
one. Elijah learnt in the silence that he was not indis- 
pensable to this God of infinite power, who could be mani- 
fested in such imperturbable placidity. ‘There were vast 
reserves of strength in this God who could smite the earth 
with such fury and suddenly rest again in such immovable 
calm. Had He not made Himself most evident when most 
invisible ? And in His ways with men, if He tarried and 
kept silence while Jezebel’s prophets worked their will, 
Elijah could nevertheless understand now that the cause 
was not lost. God was too great for haste ; but the end 
was not yet. He, poor perturbed mortal, must not judge 
God by the measure of his own exhausted strength, He 
had done his bit for the true cause. One thing alone 
remained—that he should ordain his successors, the men 
through whom God’s unhurried purpose should be carried 
out in futuredays. Not to one man, or to one generation, 
was it given to finish the Lord’s work, who has all eternity 
to work in. And thus God’s champion learnt that deep 
confiding faith which breeds at once humility and hope ; 
which puts one in one’s place in the ranks of God’s army, 
and gives, at the same time, that sense of fellowship in an 
imperishable succession which forbids despair. 

Herein is all the humbling discipline of change. In 
every generation and in every social group one or two 
figures will stand out as unchallenged leaders ; their little 
world seems Mey, dependent on them; their names 
are_on every one’s lips, maybe for a decade. But times 
change ; ; and “God fulfils Himself in many ways, lest 


2.64. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


one good custom should corrupt the world.”” ‘These leaders 
grow old before they are aware of it. Younger enthusiasms 
are pressing to take their place, enthusiasms they can scarce 
recognize and may easily be jealous of. “The exact atmo- 
sphere of social thought in which their particular work came 
nobly to the front™has imperceptibly altered. “Their very 
success has altered it. And the world awaits strange faces, 
other men. At last these old leaders recognize with astonish- 
ment that their day is over; the wave that carried them 
aloft has spent itself ; they are no longer the indispensable 
helmsmen. It is easy, then, for a man to fall into chagrin, 
for an injured vanity to warp his view of current move- 
ments and future prospects, for doubt and distrust of the 
younger world and its new-fangled methods to turn the 
old-time pioneer into the timid and carping conservative, 
These are the peculiar temptations of the elderly ; and 
only a great faith in God can overcome them, and leave 
old age full of the grace of humility and the courage of 
hope. But these patient and gentle virtues are what God 
demands from the old folk; for only by them can men 
link themselves on to the younger generations whom they 
are bidden to bless and ordain for that divine strife which is 
at once ever old and ever new. It may tax our faith to 
fight in the vanguard of God’s war ; but the glamour and 
excitement of leadership stimulate and sustain. It is a 
far greater tax on our faith to lay aside our well-proved 
weapons, and, with a graceful disregard of self, to give 
our encouraging benediction to the younger men who come 
forward with unaccustomed arms, Yet that is for ever 
the last commission God lays upon us. We are not to 
whine despairingly because our onset has not finished the 
fight ; not to gaze abroad with distrustful contempt as if 
none but ourselves were left to fulfil God’s work ; not 
to be sullen and suicidal because we cannot enjoy the solitary 
honour of completed victory. To retire thus from the 
scene would be pusillanimous indeed, We have to obliterate 


A STILL SMALL VOICE 265 


self and ‘“‘keep the young generations in hail,” anointing 
them by wise sympathy and hopeful encouragement. And 
in so doing we shall ourselves be blessed with the great 
strength of fellowship, with the sense of membership in an 
imperishable brotherhood ; and old age will not, then, 
be sad or lonely. 

There lies the reward of Churchmanship, and the en- 
couraging message of apostolical succession. ‘The isolated 
man, however valiantly good, will be faced with despair 
at last. He who retains the hope of youth is he who has 
lost himself in a larger entity; who can perceive the genera- 
tions bonded together in a common task under one un- 
changing God and Father of all; who believes in a holy 
catholic Church that overlaps the ages, wherein the torch 
of truth is passed undimmed from hand to hand. 


It fortifies my soul to know 

That, though I perish, truth is so: 
That, howsoe’er I stray and range, 
Whate’er I do, Thou dost not change. 
I steadier step when I recall 

That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall. 


That is the lesson we must learn in the quietness when 
our own tumultuous fight is lulled. ‘The One remains : 
the many change and pass.” And we are not God’s only 
servants. It will not be easy for us to appreciate the hurly- 
burly of the new age, or to see God’s sure constructive work 
going forward in it. It will look, as to Arnold, a mere 
Bacchanalian revel of undisciplined youth, and we shall 
turn wistful eyes to the past lying silent behind us where 
our own firm work was done. 

Thundering and bursting 
In torrents, in waves— 
Carolling and shouting 
Over tombs, amid graves— 
See! on the cumber’d plain 
Clearing a stage, 

Scattering the past about 
Comes the new age. 


2.66 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


Not readily does the elderly heart respond to this gay 
new enterprise. It is full of a heavenly glow, is it? “Ah, 
so the silence was! So was the hush!” Arnold paints 
exquisitely the human mood of regret and dubious aloof- 
ness. But it is a mood to be corrected by a sound religion. 
Our faith bids us-retire hopefully, keeping fellowship with 
the future, in the spirit of Meredith’s jolly line: “I can 
hear a faint crow of the cock of fresh mornings, far, far, 
yet distinct.” Elijah can no longer bear the brunt of the 
battle, but he has still a work of benediction to perform, a 
succession to ordain. With the gracious humility and 
courageous hope of that act let his life-work be completed. 

‘* Hope thou in God ; rest in the Lord and wazt patiently 
upon Him; in quietness and confidence shall be your 
strength.” ... “‘ Where wast thou when I laid the founda- 
tions of the earth?”’ . . . “ For my thoughts are not your 
thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. 
But as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, 
and watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and 
bud : so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth ; 
it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish 
that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto 
I send it.” ... You have fought the good fight; you 
have finished your course, you have kept the faith, Now 
separate me these others for the work whereunto I have 
called them. And do thou tarry while I come. 

That is the message of the still small voice—a message 
of humility and of patience and of hope in God. 


OF 





And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, 
there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both 
asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And 
Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, 
and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more. 

It, KINGS di) a7, 22 


XX 


THE CHARIOT OF ASCENSION 


N the records of the earliest evangelization of England 

no name shines out with greater glory than that of 
St. Aidan, the apostle of Northumbria. The monks of 
Iona had sent a mission into north England, but it had 
soon been given up in despair. ‘The first missioner returned 
to Iona declaring that no good could be done to such a 
turbulent race as the Northumbrians. ‘The brethren sat 
in council deliberating over this bad news. At last, Aidan, 
who was present, said: “It seems to me that you have 
been somewhat too harsh with these ignorant men, and 
have not dealt with them according to the apostle’s 
maxim—first making your teaching easy, and then going 
on little by little until they could receive the deep things 
of God.” Every one thereupon turned toward the speaker, 
and said that he was the man to make a second attempt 
at the great evangelistic task. So Aidan came into Northum- 
bria, and by his very remarkable grace and gentleness won 
the hearts of the wild inhabitants, and rapidly built up a 
Christian Church among them. He made his head-quarters 
at Lindisfarne, which, through the associations of his beauti- 
ful piety, became so sanctified a spot in all men’s eyes that 
ever afterwards it was called the Holy Island. And close 
to this Holy Island, in a shelter beside the tiny church of 
the king’s castle of Bamborough, St. Aidan died in the 
year O51. 

On the night of his death—a summer night in late 
August—a shepherd-boy was keeping watch over his 

209 


270 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


flock in the Lammermuir Hills. He was a boy already 
remarked for a strange piety, and destined later on to become 
the most famous saint of northern England. ‘This boy, 
Cuthbert, while his companion shepherds slept, saw a vision 
of angels ‘bearing a soul to heaven—angels winging their 
way into the far reaches of the starlit sky above him as he 
lay there on the open hills. A few days later he learnt 
that in that same hour St. Aidan had passed away. He took 
the vision as a call to himself for divine service, and forth- 
with journeying to Melrose was enrolled there as a monk, 
and began that great career which is memorialized in English 
life for ever in the glorious towers of Durham which were 
raised above his tomb. 

Other visions of the heavenly ascension of the dead 
have been recorded. We are told, for example, how one 
of the disciples of St. Francis of Assisi, at the time of the 
saint’s death, saw his soul “like unto a star of the bigness 
of the moon, and beaming with the brightness of the sun, 
borne above. many waters in a shining white cloudlet, 
ascending forthright into heaven by a straight path.” 
Perhaps such a story may be merely a product of pious 
literary fancy. But in the case of Cuthbert it would seem 
that there was a real psychic experience on his part con- 
temporaneous with the death of Aidan : the living shepherd- 
boy becoming subconsciously aware—through subtle links 
of spiritual sympathy that we cannot comprehend—of the 
death of the old bishop scores of miles away; and this 
intuitive knowledge expressing itself spontaneously in an 
imaginative vision, only explicable later on when actual 
news of the bishop’s death arrived. It is anyhow an arrest- 
ing story, not to be fathomed by merely murmuring feeble 
words about coincidence. 

And our Bible story of the ascension of Elijah must 
surely be considered in the light of such other stories of the 
visionary ascent of souls as history provides us with. ‘They 
will not enable us to give an intelligible account of exactly 


THE CHARIOT OF ASCENSION 271 
what happened at Elijah’s death, but they will help to pro- 


vide a point of view for our approach to that famous story. 
In their light it will be seen to fall into its place among a 
group of more or less kindred legends—some, perhaps, 
merely creations of literary fancy, but others pointing to 
psychical impressions really received in connection with 
men’s deaths, and greatly deepening the sense of death’s 
unreality and of the victorious survival of the soul. All 
we can be sure of is that Elisha was credited—probably 
on the basis of tradition handed down from himself—with 
having beheld a vision of Elijah mounting heavenwards, 
as Cuthbert and others have been credited with similar 
visions more or less authenticated. As to how that vision 
came, and in what circumstances it came, and what its 
precise nature was, we can but make our guesses, tracing 
such measure of fact as is possible in the marvellously 
dramatic, but all too brief and uninforming, narrative 
preserved to us. 

The scene is once again laid among the mountains. 
The three most dramatic incidents in Elijah’s life-story 
fall upon great hill-summits—a triangle of summits marking 
the extreme west, south and east borders of the Holy Land. 
And each time, on Carmel, on Horeb, and now on Nebo, 
the prophet stands wrapped in storm. Himself a man of 
solitary and impetuous spirit, such wild settings are appro- 
priate to him. ‘There is something remote, austere, 
untamed about him to the last. 

Some considerable period had elapsed since his fugitive 
retreat to Sinai. Ahab and Jezebel had perpetrated their 
mean crime against Naboth, and the dauntless old prophet 
had once more risked his life by rebuking the king to his 
face. But now Ahab was dead, and Jezebel’s influence 
_had apparently waned, for the schools of the prophets of 
Yahweh are numerous and undisturbed. Elijah, aged 
now, is their revered leader, and Elisha is his constant 
companion. ‘hese were very different circumstances from 


272 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


what he had expected when, lonely and despairing, he had 
asked for death, because his work seemed all unavailing and 
no helper was left to him. God had led him out into a 
wealthy place after all. His example had inspired the younger 
generation, and he lived now full of years and honour 
among troops of adoring friends. He had learnt his lesson 
of humility and hope; he is less of the egoist, maybe—a 
little mellower and more patient, though still a terror to 
wrongdoers ; and he has his reward in human fellowship. 

Yet it is the same grand self-reliant figure that we see, 
with the inborn instinct of the hermit ; and as the approach 
of death becomes imminent he strides away to die alone 
among the hills. 

It is the great tableland of Moab that he goes to, adjacent 
to his own native country of Gilead, and the place where in 
the far past Moses had died and been buried by the hand 
of God, as men declared. It may have been toward Gilead 
that he was making his way when he crossed Jordan and 
began climbing into the hills of Moab. Or it may, perhaps, 
have been that he was preoccupied with the memory of 
Moses, and would fain seek death in those solitudes where 
the great hero of the Exodus had taken his farewell of 
earth. Nebo is one of the highest spurs in that long, almost 
horizontal, line of hills that flank the eastern beach of the 
Dead Sea. It is apparently identical with Pisgah, whence 
Moses viewed the Land of Promise he was never to enter ; 
and it commands a noble prospect of the tumbled hills of 
Palestine. “The tableland of Moab, with its bold westward 
escarpment, and gradual eastward slope toward the desert, 
was itself largely cultivated—a land of blowing corn. But 
it is cut into again and again by deep wild ravines, in much 
the same fashion as the Cheddar Gorge cuts up into the 
soft pasture land on the summit of Mendip ; and its aspect 
as seen from the Dead Sea, into which these many ravines 
descend, is barren in the extreme. ‘The precipitous flanks 
of these hills of Moab are still infested with wolves, jackals, 


THE CHARIOT OF ASCENSION 273 


hyzenas, and vultures. A dead body would not lie long 
in such a district. ‘‘ The whole land,” it has been said, 
““is a sepulchre.” It frowns there desolate and untamed 
above the bitter waters and bleached shores of the Sea of 
Death. Although beyond the shoulders of its cliffs there 
are smiling cornlands ; and the innumerable ancient cairns 
and dolmens speak of human occupation in the farthest 
past ; yet its torn gorges could not be civilized : there the 
wolf and vulture live out their fierce and hungry lives. 

To such a place, sacred with the memory of the death 
of Moses, Elijah went forth advisedly and deliberately, 
urged by inward premonition of his own approaching dis- 
solution. He had sought to go forth alone, as did ‘Tolstoi ; 
as apparently did Moses himself, and as so many lonely- 
minded men have done in old times. But Elisha will 
not leave him. ‘Trusty henchman that he ts, he determines 
to be present to the end, and forces his company on Elijah, 
despite repeated protest, praying only that a double portion 
—an elder son’s portion—of the prophetic spirit may fall’ 
upon him as reward for his loyalty. And Elijah vouches 
that it shall be so if Elisha shows mettle enough to stand 
with him to the end, So the two men cross Jordan together. 

The story as we have it is saturated in supernaturalism, 
through which one can but grope for reality. Yet there 
is a superb splendour of restrained excitement in the telling 
of it, as stage by stage the two men advance upon their 
journey, that makes the passage of the river, with the help 
of the miraculous cloak, fall appropriately into its place 
as but one further ascending step in breathless wonderment 
toward the final unearthly pageant. The fords of Jordan 
near Jericho are more difficult than those on the upper 
reaches of the river, and in times of high flood become 
impassable. It is highly probable that Elijah would need 
to take off his mantle in order to avoid a wetting, if not 
in order to dry up the water by means of it! Anyhow, 
the awkward ford is traversed ; and the two men probably 

18 


2.74. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


advance up the Wady Ayan Musa, or one of the neigh- 
bouring gorges that lead toward the summit of Nebo. 

But what then happened is wrapped in impenetrable 
mystery. Whether by accident in storm, or by a fall over 
some precipice, or by natural causes, we are not told, but 
somewhere in those fastnesses Elijah passed away. ‘The 
two friends were parted asunder. But the whole marvel 
of the story is that Elisha, left there alone, realized not 
death but ascension. What he saw was not the pitiful 
decay of the human body but the glorious ascension of his 
friend to God. “It came to pass, as they still went on, 
and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, 
and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and 
Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” Surely 
nowhere else in human literature has death been so sublimely 
portrayed ! 

And the wonder of such language is by far the more 
remarkable when we remember the normal thought of old 
Israel in face of death. It was easy for a disciple of St. 
Francis to vision his saintly leader’s soul ascending like a 
star to God, for the Christian hope of centuries had taught 
men to think of the beloved dead as passing on and up to 
Paradise. But to old Israel no such hope had been taught. 
To their thought the dead passed out of God’s realm, down- 
ward into the abyss of Sheol, into the pit of darkness where 
no man any longer could praise and serve the Lord. “The 
grave cannot praise ‘hee, death cannot celebrate Thee : 
they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. 
The living, the living, he shall praise Thee.” ‘That cry 
of Hezekiah’s represents the normal thought of Israel. 
And so again and again the old psalmists plead for a pro- 
longation of human life on the sunlit earth: “‘ Hide not 
thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into 
the pit”; “I am counted with them that go down into 
the pit, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom Thou , 
rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy 


THE CHARIOT OF ASCENSION 275 


hand. ‘Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in 
the deeps. Wilt Thou show wonders to the dead? Shall 
the dead arise and praise Thee? Shall thy loving-kindness 
be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? 
Shall thy wonders be known in the dark ? And thy righteous- 
ness in the land of forgetfulness?”’ ‘That is the normal 
Hebrew imagery of death. It is a descent into darkness, into 
a land of forgetfulness, where a man is cut off from God, 
and no longer remembered, no longer capable of communion 
with Him. ‘There was life of a sort in Sheol, but it was a 
mere parody of life—chill, godless, unsuccoured. The faith 
of Israel fluttered feebly and sank hopeless in face of the 
stark fact of bodily corruption. A New Testament writer, 
centuries later, could pick out the exceptional case of Enoch, 
and declare that he was translated that he should not see 
death ; but it is doubtful if such an idea can be legitimately 
read into that ancient phrase of Genesis that God took him 
and therefore he was not. ‘The hope of an ascent through 
death to some grander sphere of life begins to penetrate 
Hebrew thought only in one or two rare passages of the 
latest Old ‘Testament writings. In all the earlier period 
death, without exception, was faced as a practical annihila- 
tion, a withdrawal from life and God into some faint numb 
underground existence, a mere shadow-land—the Pit. 
The story of the ascent of Elijah, therefore, stands out 
in unique significance. It is the first and only occasion 
where the Old ‘Testament rises triumphantly beyond ail 
dismay of death and seizes upon the hope of a glorious 
immortality in the wide freedom and dazzling light of 
heaven. Here, and here alone, is death depicted as a victor’s 
triumphant progress, chariot-driven to the gates of God’s 
own dwelling-place. Not until we reach the New Testa- 
ment story of Christ’s ascension to the right hand of God 
do we meet with so magnificent an interpretation of the 
meaning of this strange and staggering experience of man’s 


laying aside of the earthly body. 


276 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


It is probably futile to attempt to search out the precise 
reasons for the symbolism of this story. Elijah, and after 
him Elisha, were themselves spoken of as “the chariots 
and horses of Israel,” so great was their prestige, so strong 
the power they wielded in the nation. Each of them was 
worth far more than a regiment to Israel. Each was a 
host in himself. It may be that Elisha’s cry of momentary 
despair when he realized that Elijah had gone from him— 
‘“‘ My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horse- 
men thereof ’’—has, by some twist in the handing down 
of this narrative of how “ the chariot of Israel ”’ had ascended 
to God, become confused into a vision of a fiery chariot 
which Elijah boarded and which carried him away heaven- 
ward, But, however suggested, the remarkableness and 
glory of this tale of heavenly ascension is no wit lessened. 
The fact remains that here for once, in connection with 
the great hero-prophet Elijah, Israel’s normal attitude in 
face of death was completely altered, and a great shaft of 
light breaks suddenly upon the dreary mystery of mortality : 
a man is visioned not as descending into Sheol, altogether 
out of God’s realm of light and life, but—prodigious hope ! 
—ascending to the zenith to share with angelic hosts, with 
seraphim and cherubim, the glad brilliance of divine com- 
munion in a nearness unapproachable on earth. It is 
an utter turnover of thought. For the first time in Israel’s 
history faith has broken through the gates of death, and 
seen there not degradation and annihilation, but glorifica- 
tion and the consummation of all hope. “‘ He was taken 
up by a whirlwind into heaven.” That grand, awful 
sentence may be said to mark the birth in Israel of the faith 
in immortality. 

That faith is not lightly attained. Only after many 
centuries of experience and reflection did Israel attain it. It 
is an indispensable, integral element of our Christian creed, 
but even after two thousand years of Christian witness 
it still, of course, remains for the individual to grasp this 


THE CHARIOT OF ASCENSION 279 


faith for himself ; and how many multitudes of would-be 
Christian folk do not grasp it! We are still, in the mass, 
dismayed at death. Westill dread it as a loss of all desirable 
things, all warmth and brightness and love and laughter. 
We are still overwhelmed by the loathsome and ugly 
_. aspects of decay. Like poor Hamlet brooding over Yorick’s 
skull, we see only the gaping hollow where sweet, humorous 
lips had hung, and cavernous sockets where bright eyes 
had flashed at us; and our imagination abhors it all, our 
gorge rises at it. All this charnel-house imagery stands 
confronting our faith, a formidable contestant. We need 
a counter-imagery to lend help to our halting creed—the 
imagery of the soul’s ascension such as we have in this old 
tale. Not that this in itself can ground us in the faith. 
To believe in resurrection to eternal life we must first 
be utterly convinced of God as Father Almighty. “The 
one faith is a direct corollary from the other, and unattainable 
apart from it. But the faith in resurrection must have its 
symbols of expression, and the nobler they are the better 
will our imaginations be saved from engrossment with the 
skeleton and the worm. So the story of the fiery chariot 
is very precious for ever. It restores our balance against 
the maddening weight of cynical reflection when our imagina- 
tion begins to “‘trace the noble dust of Alexander till he 
find it stopping a bung-hole.” 

Elijah’s body was doubtless eaten by wolf or vulture : 
to search for it was, as Elisha knew, quite futile. But 
we are never led to think of a few bleached bones in 
a ravine as all that remained of a magnificent human 
being. These fleshly relics are out of the picture alto- 
gether. Elijah was not there. Our backs are turned upon 
such vision, and we are bidden instead to see the skiey 
chargers and the wheels of flame, and a man ascending 
to God. 

So that we find ourselves more than half in love with 
easeful death. 


278 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


The faith in immortality is integral in our creed. 
It is not to be outgrown or superseded. ‘There may 
be recurrent periods—as the mid-Victorian—when many 
earnest and high-principled folk try to persuade them- 
selves that there is even a superior virtue in throwing 
away the desire of eternal life. But the fallacy of such an 
idea is patent. It is but a forlorn way of trying to reconcile 
the heart to a grim unbelief which makes the universe 
at once Irrational and damnable. A world in which every- 
thing perishes with the body is a world in which, at long 
last, nothing survives at all. ‘The last man dies, and the 
earth swings about in space, a burnt out cinder ; and nothing 
of all the marvellous evolution of the «ons is garnered. 
A purposeless, fantastic play has come to an end, that is all. 
The issue is nullity, a reductio ad absurdum. But there can 
be no other issue unless somehow spiritual values, that is, 
personal values, survive bodily death. ‘The choice is 
between a faith in resurrection and a vision of the issue 
of things so contemptibly silly that all purpose and hope 
is taken out of life altogether. With the sternest intention 
possible, nobody really faces up to the latter grotesque 
absurdity. A Shelley, in his prose writing, will tell us 
that he denies immortality ; but when he pens 4donais 
his heart talks the language of Christian hope. His lan- 
guage in that poem is the merest moonshine unless the 
Christian creed be true. On the basis of his own prose 
denial of personal survival he is merely vapouring when 
he declares that “‘ the soul of Adonais like a star beacons 
from the abode where the eternal are,”’ or when he pictures 
the kings of thought rising from their thrones in the un- 
apparent to greet the newly dead. Shelley’s heart was 
wiser than his head in this matter. He illustrates the 
impossibility of really resting upon a negation of survival. 
He cannot hold true to his own chilly premises. And 
we have to thank his illogicality for that grandest of English 
dirges, Adonais. He, too, one feels pretty sure, would 


THE CHARIOT OF ASCENSION 2.79 


have come in time to accept in all soberness the gospel 
of resurrection as the necessary intellectual basis for any 
such imagery as he allowed himself in his poem. Anyhow, 
Adonats could hardly have been written outside Christendom. 
Its thought is fed from Christian fountains. It breathes 
the atmosphere of unconquerable hope that Christianity 
finally spread abroad and alone can firmly sustain—an 
atmosphere whose first breath, like the first detached stirring 
of the wind at dawn, is felt in this ancient tale of Elijah’s 
chariot of fire. It was because of this story, and of every 
glorious expression of faith in resurrection which had fol- 
lowed it down the centuries, that the triumphant closing 
stanzas of such a poem as 4donais could be written by a 
man whose doubts were yet holding him back from a whole- 
minded conviction of the Christian truth. Elisha’s story lit 
a candle in the world which can never be put out. Gradu- 
ally the idea of Sheol was ousted from men’s minds, and 
they began to be able to look upon the death of a righteous 
man as an exultant escape from weakness into power, from 
earth to heaven’s glory. God’s triumphal car awaited 
him, like a hero returning from the wars. And so death 
could be accepted gladly, as life was accepted gladly. Both 
are overruled by the one God who doeth all things well, 
and whose will toward us is love. 

We no longer dream of going down into the pit. Death 
has lost its horror. “Into the breast that gives the rose, 
shall I with shuddering fall?”’? We no longer cry out for 
an indefinite prolongation of life in the body, as the old 
psalmist did. Rather we say with Stevenson : 

Under the wide and starry sky 
Dig the grave and let me lie ; 


Glad did I live and gladly die, 
And I laid me down with a will. 


For we lie down but to rise again. We lose this body 
of humiliation that we may be clothed upon with a body 
of glory. 


280 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


Fear death ?—to feel the fog in my throat, 
The mist in my face... 

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers 
The heroes of old, 

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears 
Of pain, darkness and cold. 

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, 
The black minute’s at end, 

And the element’s rage, the fiend-voices that rave, 
Shall dwindle, shall blend, 

Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 
Then a light, then thy breast, 

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest ! 


So has God led our poor, brave, bewildered race out 
of darkness into His marvellous light, and given us to see 
through death the glory of the soul’s ascension 


* ore) 


Abe? piensa. 7 
E, ALL 





When the servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone forth, 
behold, an host compassed the city both with horses and chariots. And 
his servant said unto him, Alas, my master! how shall we do? And 
he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that 
be with them. And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee, open 
his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young 
man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and 
chariots of fire round about Elisha. 

II. KINGS vi. 15-17. 


XXI 


THE INVISIBLE ALLIES 


HE prophets of old Israel were sometimes in positions 

of great political influence. Isaiah, for example, 
seems to have been a sort of Prime Minister in his day. 
And the older prophets, Elijah and Elisha, were both, in 
their very different fashions, extremely influential personages 
in the life of their times : Elijah, a man of the wilderness, 
a solitary, with something of fanatic fire in him, who dashed 
down upon the cities now and again with his thunderous 
denunciations against base superstition and social wrong ; 
Elisha, in his youth a prosperous farmer, afterwards a town- 
dweller, an astute man of affairs, and apparently the head 
of a college or order of prophets, like a Superior among the 
Dominicans or the Jesuits. Elijah’s influence was political 
only in the way of a John the Baptist or a Savonarola—an 
intense moral force for kings and courts to reckon with in 
its influence on the crowd. But Elisha is a frequenter of 
cities and courts. He is interviewed by kings and captains. 
He has a share in the direction of national affairs, as a trusted 
counsellor. He is the dominant figure in society—the 
Beckett or the Wolsey of his day. We are sometimes 
brought up to think of him as a pious old gentleman whose 
chief function on earth was to provide a source of fun to 
rude children who laughed at his bald head. But that 
old nursery tale is not really a very important part of the 
life-story of this great man. Legend has woven many 
impossible tales around his name ; indeed, no figure in the 


Old ‘Testament is credited with such a record of amazing 
‘ 283 


284 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


thaumaturgy. But we are able to trace through all this 
something of the astuteness and breadth of power by which 
he won so tremendous a prestige; and we can discern 
clearly enough what important and splendid services he 
wrought on behalf*of his people. 

In the story with which we are here concerned we 
learn that Israel had been attacked by the Syrians from 
the neighbourhood of Damascus, whence, some years 
before, the warrior Naaman had come to Elisha to be 
healed of his leprosy. A tiresomely long war was being 
fought out. Again and again the Syrian king found 
his plans prevented and foiled in a most vexatious 
manner. He is convinced that there must be a traitor 
in his ranks, making communications to the enemy. But 
his generals know better. It is all due to Elisha, they say. 
Elisha finds out everything. “Elisha, the prophet that 
is in Israel, telleth the king of Israel the words that thou 
speakest in thy bedchamber.” It was extremely discon- 
certing. But there was the fact. Elisha was acting as a 
sort of chief of the secret service department of Israel’s 
war office, managing time after time to get wind of the 
enemy’s movements and to warn his king against various 
ambuscades. How he managed it we do not know; but 
his eminent success in the work is vouched for by the Syrians 
themselves. And so acute is their sense of Elisha’s uncanny 
knowledge of all their plans that they come to regard him 
as an insuperable obstacle to their victory ; and they deter- 
mine that, if the war is to be won, Elisha must first be taken 
prisoner—a very high compliment to the thoroughness and 
cleverness of his work as Israel’s intelligence-officer. 

At the time that this resolution was taken Elisha was 
living at a little village called Dothan or the Two Wells. | 
It still bears this name, and still shows two springs and two 
ancient cisterns. It was at this place that Joseph’s brethren 
put him into. the well-pit. The village stands on a hillock 
in a small plain among the hills of Samaria. It lies near 


THE INVISIBLE ALLIES 285 


the northern edge of these hills, and the valley surrounding 
it debouches northward into the great plain of Esdraelon ; 
and an ancient high road runs through it which links the 
plain of Esdraelon with the plain of Sharon. It was a 
place, therefore, of great strategic importance—one of the 
chief northern outposts of Samaria. Standing in the village 
and looking northward into the great plain, one would 
be overlooking the historic battlefield of Israel: the field 
of Megiddo, or Armageddon, where all Israel’s most critical 
fights had taken place. Dothan stood like a watch-tower 
at the edge of the hills, strong in the natural fortification of 
its isolated hillock—a Samaritan Stirling. 

The Syrian army was doubtless in the plain of Esdraelon 
or on the slopes of the hills to the north of it; and so 
Elisha’s lodging at Dothan meant that he was “in the 
line.’? No more central spot could be chosen for his work 
on behalf of the army. Samaria, the capital, lay twelve 
miles to the rear across the hills. 

But apparently Dothan itself was not strongly guarded, 
and the main army was not encamped in its immediate 
neighbourhood. ‘The Syrians dispatched a large attacking 
party under cover of night up from the great plain into 
the Dothan valley, and before dawn the enemy had encircled 
the village. ‘The surprise was, on this occasion, perfectly 
successful, Elisha’s servant going out of doors in the 
early morning is aghast to find the village surrounded, 
and rushes back to his master with the bad news. But 
Elisha does not turn a hair. He is superbly calm. ‘“ Fear 
not,” he says, “for they that be with us are more than 
they that be with them.” And thereupon follows an 
incident of most admirable pluck, of most daring cleverness, 
which shows up Elisha as a hero of thrilling adventures ; a 
man who would win the heart of any schoolboy, if we had 
imagination enough to see the true meaning of the very 
compressed and cryptic story related in the Book of Kings, 
and to expand it into the admirable and amusing yarn of 


286 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


courage and adroitness that really lies embedded in the 
sparse verses of that old chronicle. 

Elisha knows well enough what the object of the Syrians 
is in thus surrounding Dothan. But he was going to 
make an effort to evade capture if he could. He hastily 
disguises himself; and praying God that they may not 
have the wit to detect him, walks out boldly to meet them. 
With the coolest manner imaginable he enters into con- 
versation with them, and hears their purpose from their 
own lips. ‘Oh, it is Elisha you are after, is it? I'll 
take you to him. But this is not the way, nor Is this the 
city where you will discover him: follow me, Dll bring 
you to the man you are looking for.” And he leads them 
up the valley and over the hill-pass, a twelve-mile tramp 
down into Samaria, where the whole regiment finds itself 
trapped and imprisoned. ‘Then, no doubt, off comes Elisha’s 
disguise, and with a polite smile he says, “‘ I think it was 
Elisha you were seeking for: I am your man. At your 
service, gentlemen !” 

It is an hilariously good tale. It reminds one of the 
yarns told about Lord Kitchener in his earlier days in 
Egypt and the Soudan: how he would disguise himself, 
and, trusting to his splendid mastery of dialect, go riding 
alone into enemy camps, pick up all the information he 
wanted, and then return home again to put it all to use in 
his military work. Or one thinks of that thrilling little 
episode in the life of Mazzini. He was living in London; but 
Italian spies were out after him, and they had discovered, 
and were watching, the house where he lodged. As the 
story goes, he disguised himself, and strode out of the front 


door with a cigar in his mouth, fumbled in his pockets for | 


imaginary matches, and then deliberately walked up to one 
of the spies and asked for a light, and thereupon strolled 
quietly away. 

Or a still closer parallel is shown in a story told of St 
Athanasius. He had been exiled from Alexandria by order 


THE INVISIBLE ALLIES 2.87 


of the Emperor Julian, and a threat of still more severe 
punishment had been launched against him. In obedience 
to the Emperor’s edict of exile he was travelling by boat 
up the Nile toward some refuge in the desert, when he 
learnt that a government vessel was pursuing him. 50 he 
had his course reversed and turned down-stream again. 
Soon the government boat was seen approaching 3 it hailed 
them, and asked if they knew where Athanasius was. “ He 
is not far off,’ said some one, perhaps Athanasius himself ; 
and off went the government boat on its fool’s errand up- 
stream, while Athanasius got comfortably away into hiding; 
Athanasius ventured on that piece of bluff in order to show 
his companions that “our protector is more powerful 
than our persecutor’”’—words that recall those of Elisha 
himself, 

‘That, then, is how God smote the Syrians with blindness 
at the prayer of Elisha. Elisha blinded them by his cool 
nerve and incomparable effrontery, just as Mazzini blinded 
the spies, or Kitchener the Arabs in their camps, or Athan- 
asius the emissaries of Julian. ‘Truly it was a heaven-sent 
blindness, brought about by the spiritual dower of courage 
and wit in the life of a great man disciplined by prayer and 
self-regardless service. 

And having thus outwitted his foes, Elisha saved them 
by a noble act of magnanimity. “They were prisoners of 
war, and the king at once thought of putting them all to 
death. ‘‘Shall I smite them, my father? Shall I smite 
them?” he says to Elisha. But the great prophet forbade 
the slaughter, and ordered food and drink to. be set before 
them ; and when they had had a good meal, he sent them 
back again to the Syrian camp. And that great act of 
magnanimity seems to have put an end to the war. ‘The 
King of Syria had grace enough to make peace with so 
merciful an enemy. “So the bands of Syria came no more 
into the land of Israel.” 

This was a great man, in good sooth. No wonder they 


288 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


called him “ the chariots and horses of Israel”?! He was 
worth an army corps to his king and country. 

But we have thus far overlooked the most impressive 
feature of all in this thrilling little story. When, in the 
early morning, Elisha’s servant came trembling with the 
news that Dothan was surrounded, the poor fellow had 
cried desperately, “‘ Alas, my master ! how shall we do?” 
Elisha rebukes his timidity. And then, we are told, Elisha 
prayed, ‘‘ Lord, open his eyes, that he may see.” And the 
Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw : and, 
behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of 
fire round about Elisha. ‘The secret of Elisha’s courage, 
~as of Mazzini’s, lay in his faith. He felt that God was with 
him, and that material force is as nothing against spiritual 
power. ‘To the man of spiritual vision there are enormous 
invisible reinforcements available which make it impossible 
for him to despair. If he is fighting for the right against 
criminal aggression, then the whole force of God’s universe 
is on his side. It is impossible for right to be finally over- 
thrown, no matter what temporary disasters may befall it. 
If God reigns, then justice will prevail, and no power 
of evil men can prevent it prevailing. “To be on the side 
of right is to be on the winning side. For there is that in 
the heart of man—the spark of the Holy Spirit in him—which 
will not permanently tolerate evil ; and every struggle on 
behalf of the good cause will sooner or later arouse to its 
support all the will towards good which exists latent in 
humanity. In the long run it is thoughts, emotions, sym- 
pathies, volitions which determine victory, not mere mechan- 
ical forces of equipment. Where the spiritual forces are 
lacking, the mechanical forces will in the long run exhaust 
themselves. But spiritual forces are inexhaustible, for 
they draw upon the almighty power of God. 

It was because Israel, as a nation, felt this reliance upon 
spiritual power more deeply than did other ancient peoples, 
that it stands out, and its literature stands out, in a peculiar, 


THE INVISIBLE ALLIES 289 


unique fashion in the world’s history. Not that the average 
Israelite lived up consistently to the level of the Old Testa- 
ment faith at its best. Far from it. But, generation by 
- generation, this people did throw up great prophetic souls 
in whom the fire of this faith burnt blazingly clear. And 
the nation was again and again saved by them. ‘Through 
captivity in Egypt and in Babylon, through civil warfare 
and border warfare, through the traitorous idolatry of bad 
kings, and the cowardly sloth of a bad populace, the sublime 
faith in a God who loved righteousness was preached from 
age to age quenchlessly. ‘The greater souls in Israel never 
lost sight of their invisible allies. If the nation remained 
true to its divine calling, God would see it through all 
perils, and no force on earth could wrest from it its final 
prosperity and beatitude. “That was the intense conviction 
of the prophets. It was the intense conviction of this 
great man Elisha. And so, for him, there was always an 
open vision of the horses and chariots of fire. Aye, and 
his faith could inspire the vision in others. His timid 
servant, rushing scared into his presence, wins quietness 
and assurance as Elisha prays for him ; and the young man’s 
eyes are opened: he, too, sees the invisible cohorts of 
heaven, the bodyguard of righteousness—present always 
to the eye of faith ; invisible only to the purblindness of 
earth-bound souls. “To Jesus in Gethsemane it comes 
with perfect naturalness to exclaim: ‘‘ Thinkest thou that 
I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently 
give me more than twelve legions of angels?” Faith 
speaks thus, because faith is so sure of God’s defence of 
right. 

There is a pretty story in Moslem literature which very 
closely parallels this story of Elisha at Dothan. An old 
woman was in dire trouble, it is said, because her son was 
doomed to execution as a martyr for his faith. In her 
trouble she prays ; and lo! she finds herself borne through 
the air in the twinkling of an eye to Mecca. She hurries 


19 


290 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


to the authorities in that city and begs for an army to be 
sent to her son’s rescue. ‘The authorities give over to 
her a warrior named Rassalu and four others. But when 
they approach and make preparations to start the journey, 
the old woman is utterly disheartened and contemptuous : 
“You are very few,” she says; “ what is the use of your 
marching against Sialcot?’’? “ Don’t worry, mother,” 
says Rassalu. She is a little mollified and encouraged by 
the modest confidence of his manner. “I will try not to 
worry,” she says ; “for all that, I cannot help seeing that 
you are only five.” “Shut your eyes,” says Rassalu. And 
when he bade the old woman open them again, behold ! 
the plain was covered with a host that seemed countless, 
and the trampling of their horses was like the sound of many 
thunders. It was the invisible army of justice which for ever 
fights in reinforcement of every courageous effort to right 
the wrong or to defend the true. And there we find in 
Moslemism a story symbolizing this vision of the eye of 
faith in just the same manner as in the old Jewish story 
of Elisha. 

There are moments of grave peril in the history of every 
nation when it sorely needs such prophetic souls to give 
it the vision of the chariots of heaven. No doubt the legend 
of the angels at Mons arose through imaginative repre- 
sentation of this great moral conviction that a just cause 
has heaven’s help to back it. How the story originated 
has been much in dispute ; but its author was in the line 
of the prophets. ‘The thing is true for faith—like the 
vision of the Fourth Man in the fiery furnace. It is moral 
truth on the plane of the imagination. With less fanciful- 
ness, but with a far deeper weight and dignity, Wordsworth 
sang out the same truth to England in the terrible months 
when our country was daily expecting an invasion by 
Bonaparte. Among that glorious series of sonnets dedi- 
cated to liberty which he composed, one of the most notable 
is addressed, not indeed directly to his own countrymen, 


THE INVISIBLE ALLIES 291 


but indirectly to them as fighters (so he hoped) in the same 
cause of liberty for which the hero of this sonnet had 
struggled : it is addressed to Toussaint L’Ouverture, the 
great negro soldier who had liberated the island of Hayti 
from Spanish and British slavers, and who, aiming also at 
independence from France, was taken captive, and ulti- 
mately died in a French dungeon. Wordsworth bids 
him believe that his cause shall not perish, though he himself 
falls never to rise again. His cause cannot perish, because 


it is a cause of right ; and the stars in their courses fight 
on behalf of it. 


Thou hast left behind 
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies ; 
There’s not a breathing of the common wind 
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies ; 
Thy friends are exultations, agonies, 
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind. 


It was with adorable words like these that Wordsworth 
tried to nerve the heart of England in its hour of peril. 
The exultant hope which nestles at the heart of liberty, 
the agonies of willing martyrs who shed their blood, and 
that pulse of love which, as Dante said, “‘ moves the sun 
and every star’’—these unvanquishable powers, which 
only faith can see and estimate, are the guarantee of the 
ultimate triumph of good. It is treachery to doubt. It 
is treason to despair. God reigns; and His Will shall 
prevail. ‘“‘ Wherefore seeing we are compassed about 
with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with perse- 
verance the race that is set before us.” 

The good cause will often enough seem a forlorn hope. 
The world’s evil is gigantic, and there is more of it than we 
see. We fight not merely against flesh and blood. “* Princi- 
palities and powers mustering their unseen array” are 
against us. We cannot delimit all the ramifications of 
devilish force within creation: they stretch beyond our 
ken. But we believe in God the Father Almighty, an 
all-sovran God whose hold upon the world’s throne is 


292 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


shaken by no rebellion, however portentous; who is 
infinitely resourceful to meet and overrule every evil 
that emerges in His world—not a despot’s world where 
contradiction of the sovran will is impossible ; but love’s 
world where risks are run, because God’s heart could be 
satisfied with no less brave a world than this wherein His 
victory is the constraint of love upon creatures free to accept 
or to reject Him. But His love is serenely confident 
in its power to win. Let evil be never so great, yet God 
outmatches it. “I beheld Satan as lightning fallen from 
heaven,” said Jesus exultantly. God’s unseen array is 
mightier than all the powers and principalities mustered 
against His rule. For love is indefeasible, far deeper than 
man’s deepest hate. So God’s Church goes into the fight 
with a merry nonchalance. ‘The chariots of fire are in the 
van. And it doubts not that, God aiding it, it will be 
able finally to beat down Satan under its feet. 

The grand words of old Elisha ring out the true Christian 
clarion: ‘“ Fear not; for those that be with us are more 
than those that be with them.” Oh! timid brothers, 
doubtful whether evil is not all too strong for you, aghast 
at its seeming success, agitated with feverish anxieties, open 
the eyes of your souls and see the horses and chariots of 
heaven ! 


XXII 


THE DESTRUCTION 
OF SENNACHERIB 





TH ame) aig St Roe ae ees & 7 é 
> * ou 5 ; oe : i. sie 
a io Pert ; ; 
F 
{ af = 
And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the ae we 
and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore an 
thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, Ren 
were all dead corpses. tan 
. II. Krnos XIX. 
4 ? 





XXII 


THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB 


HE ancient world was dominated by two mighty 

river states—Egypt on the Nile, and Chaldea, or 
afterwards Assyria, in the country round about the great 
twin rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The command of a 
great river was the necessary basis of prosperity and power 
in those earliest days of human civilization, as the command 
of the Mediterranean was necessary in the classical period, 
or as the command of the ocean has been in the modern 
world. Material wealth and power have always rested 
upon water transit. ‘Transit of the open ocean or even 
of the middle sea was next to impossible in man’s earliest 
civilizations. But his craft could succeed in river navigation. 
And hence it was along the beds of the greatest rivers that 
the first empires were built up. 

The empires of the Nile and of the Euphrates arose 
pretty nearly simultaneously, somewhere round about the 
period 3000 B.c. Between them lay desert—the great 
Arabian desert with one arm stretching north-westward 
across Sinai to the Mediterranean coast ; and nestling, as 
it were, on this arm and against the great bosom of the 
main desert lay the little land of Syria-Palestine—a narrow 
strip of fertile hill-country washed by the tideless Middle 
Sea. Now the main desert was almost impenetrable. For 
the people of the Nile to reach the people of the Euphrates 
they must cut across the arm of desert above Sinai, traverse 
Palestine and Syria, and reach the great river of the East 


near its sources among the northern mountains, whence 
295 


296 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


descent was easy into the Mesopotamian plains. And it 
was not very long before the imperial ambitions of Egypt 
and the Mesopotamian Powers thrust each of them out 
toward the other. For several hundred years the destinies 
of the world swayed*in this imperial duel. And the ground 
where the two giants grappled with each other was the 
Syria-Palestine area. ‘The little kingdoms nestling there 
were trampled on again and again, or were bullied by the 
rival imperial diplomacies into becoming buffer states one 
way or the other. ‘They formed the cockpit of the ancient 
world as Belgium has been the cockpit of Europe. Once 
only, under Solomon, did it seem possible for a moment that 
a third central power might arise strong enough to hold 
the two great river states asunder. But the hope was 
fugitive. ‘Ihe sheer geographical facts made its realization 
impossible. 

In the long rivalry of these old empires it was Assyria 
which, for the most part, was ascendant. “The Assyrians 
were the Prussians of the ancient world—men of blood 
and iron, who worshipped a war-god and preached a doctrine 
of frightfulness. For the best part of a millenium they 
terrorized the earth, spreading in all directions their empire 
of loot and slavery. And about the year 700 B.c. we find 
them on the last great crest of their victorious power under 
the rule of the warrior Sennacherib, who claimed to be 
- All Highest upon earth. In the language of his own in- 
scriptions he was “‘ the great, the powerful king, the King 
of the Assyrians, of the nations, of the four regions, the 
diligent ruler, the favourite of the great gods, the observer of 
sworn faith, the guardian of law, the establisher of monu- 
ments, the noble hero, the strong warrior, the first of kings, 
the punisher of unbelievers, the destroyer of wicked men.” 
Evidently a man who got up quite early! And kingdom 
after kingdom fell before this Sennacherib. ‘Tyre and 
Damascus, Moab and the Arabs of the desert all bowed 
before his onset. And now his eye was set upon distant 


THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB 297 


Egypt—that old effete colossus that he was determined 
finally to smash to pieces, putting an end once and for all 
to its insolent attempts at rivalry. But to reach Egypt he 
must first overcome the frontier fortresses in Philistia. And 
as he flung his armies down the coast to seize these places, 
he sent off an embassy of haughty officials, backed by a 
few regiments, to demand the surrender of the little hill- 
fortress of Jerusalem, which he suspected to be in league 
with Egypt. 

It was a moment of overwhelming danger for Jerusalem. 
All the other fenced cities of the hills had already given 
in to the invader. King Hezekiah, who for some years 
had maintained a brave and dignified defiance toward 
Assyria, himself now trembled and gave way, stripping 
the very Temple of its treasures in order to buy off 
Sennacherib’s wrath. An ancient inscription at Nineveh 
records it all in these terms: “ Because Hezekiah, King 
of Judah, would not submit to my yoke, I came up against 
him, and by force of arms, and by the might of my power, 
I took forty-six of his strong fenced cities, and of smaller 
towns which were scattered about, I took and plundered 
a countless number. And from those places I captured 
and carried off as spoil 200,150 people, old and young, male 
and female together, with horses and mares, asses and camels, 
oxen and sheep, a countless multitude. And Hezekiah 
himself I shut up in Jerusalem, his capital city, like a bird 
in a cage, building towers round the city to hem him in, 
and raising banks of earth against the gates to prevent his 
escape. [hen upon this Hezekiah there fell the fear of 
the power of my arms, and he sent out to me the chiefs 
and the elders of Jerusalem, with thirty talents of gold, and 
eight hundred talents of silver, and divers treasures, and 
rich and immense booty.” 

But Sennacherib was not satisfied with this tribute, 
although he brags about it so vaingloriously. Exactly 
what happened is not clear. Despite the tribute, Jerusalem 


2.98 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


remained uncaptured, and apparently still in diplomatic 
relations with Egypt. And the Assyrian warrior, busy with 
the siege of Lachish, could not afford to leave on his flank 
this insubordinate little fortress of Jerusalem. So his 
squadrons are sent up into the hills ; and the Rabshakeh 
and the Rabsaris—the Chief Cup-bearer and the Chief of 
the Eunuchs—together with the Tartan or Field-Marshal, 
appear at the city gates demanding audience, and threaten 
Jerusalem with utter overthrow if Hezekiah does not 
forthwith throw in his lot with the Assyrians and provide 
troops for their campaign. 

Never before had so dire a peril threatened the Holy City. 
Hezekiah is at his wit’s end. But one of the greatest 
personalities ever known in Jewish history was at the 
helm of affairs in Jerusalem—the great statesman-prophet 
Isaiah. And to him the king turns in his hour of agony, 
beseeching him to pray to God for deliverance. 

What hope could Isaiah give? What possibility of 
succour was there? It was as though the great Tigris 
and Euphrates themselves had swept westward, and with 
huge irresistible flood had submerged all Palestine. The 
material military force of Assyria was utterly overwhelming. 
It seemed the wildest folly for a little isolated city like 
Jerusalem to attempt for one hour to stand against it. But 
Isaiah was trained in the succession of those great prophetic 
men who had felt in the very marrow of their souls a con- 
viction of the rule on earth of a God of Righteousness. They 
refused to believe that final victory lay with the big battalions. 
They believed that moral power was more deeply founded 
than material power. “There was a force of conscience 
that no militarism could crush. And they were assured 
that, through whatever temporary defeat and martyrdom, 
the God of righteousness would at last justify the men 
of spiritual ideals against any and every domineering 
empire that sought for its own aggrandisement to enslave 
the earth, And therefore Isaiah stood undismayed. He 


THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB 2099 


believed that his people had a mission on earth to witness 
for true religion, for faith in the one and only God. And 
because of this he believed that God would defend their 
liberty and leave them room to develop their own peculiar 
institutions, until all nations should have learnt from them 
the spiritual message with which they were entrusted. 
In earlier years he had, indeed, himself declared that such 
divine defence would depend upon Israel’s religious loyalty. 
He had warned his people that if they lost their spiritual 
distinction and followed the worldly ideals of other nations, 
then they, too, would share the fate of other nations, and 
become mere pawns in the game of Assyria’s earthly con- 
quests. But he had never wholly despaired of his people’s 
conscientiousness. He had seen on the horizon of their 
future the coming of the Prince of Justice and Peace, whose 
rule, acclaimed by all, should abide for ever. No one 
had more sternly whipped the national vices than he. Yet 
he still trusted to the core of good in his people. “They 
were not utterly apostate ; and, until they were so, their 
God would not give them over to the enemy. 

And so Isaiah in this perilous crisis stands unmoved. 
And when the king appeals to him he sends back the un- 
hesitating answer: ‘‘ Thus saith the Lord, Be not afraid 
of the words with which the servants of the King of Assyria 
have blasphemed me. Behold, I will send a blast upon 
him, and he shall hear a rumour, and shall return to his own 
land ; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own 
land.” 

It was a superb defiance. ‘The scene is really one of 
epic grandeur. Isaiah and Sennacherib embody the two 
forces which all through history have struggled for the 
rule of mankind: Sennacherib, the type of all worldly 
ambition and materialistic dominance ; Isaiah, the type of 
all spiritual faith in freedom, justice, patience, and peace. 
One man with a burning conscience in a little beleaguered 
town, the capital of a tiny country no bigger than an English 


300 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


county, stands confronting, in the moral courage of his 
faith in God, the enormous dominion of the Assyrian 
tyrant. [he same drama has been played over and over 
again in history, but never more vividly than here. It 
was played by ‘Tell, by Garibaldi, by King Albert of Belgium. 
It must still be played again and again before men learn its 
lesson, and understand the powerlessness of might against 
right. But for ever the world will look back to Isaiah 
confronting Sennacherib as perhaps the sublimest example 
history can show of a national policy founded upon pas- 
sionate religious conviction. “QO Lord, Thou art my 
God ; I will exalt ‘Thee, I will praise Thy name; _ for 
‘Thou hast done wonderful things; “Thou hast been a 
strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, 
a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the 
blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall. “Thou 
wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind Is stayed on 
‘Thee.”? ‘Those are Isaiah’s own words, and in that faith 
he stood to resist the Assyrian aggression. 

His faith was justified. After the first rejection of their 
demands, the Assyrian officials come a second time to 
Jerusalem bearing a letter from Sennacherib himself. He 
has left Lachish and is marching southward to meet the 
advance of the Egyptian army. It is more than ever 
necessary to get this Jewish insubordination subdued without 
loss of time. He contemptuously bids Hezekiah give up 
the nonsense of trust in his God: “ Let not thy God in 
whom thou trustest deceive thee. Have the gods of the 
other nations delivered them out of my hands ?”’ Hezekiah 
carries the letter into the Holy Place of the Temple, and 
spreads it before the Lord, and prays: ‘‘ Of a truth, Lord, 
the Kings of Assyria have destroyed the nations and their 
lands, and have cast their gods into the fire ; for they were 
no gods but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone : 
therefore have they destroyed them. Now, therefore, O 
Lord our God, I beseech Thee, save Thou us out of his 


eS 


Se SE eee Oe roe a 


~~ 
ng a eng, op BE Ee + 


THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB 301 


hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that 
‘Thou art the Lord God, even Thou only.” 

The suspense must have been terrible. Would the 
great battle far to the south leave Egypt victorious and | 
so deliver Jerusalem ? Or would the conquering Assyrians 
return in a few days to flay alive, after their manner, Heze- 
kiah and his trembling people? But Isaiah dictates an 
answer to the embassy couched in terms of resolute defiance. 
The virgin daughter of Zion laughs them to scorn, he 
declares, and shakes her head at them. Her God will 
take this brute beast of Assyria, and put a hook in its nose 
and a bridle in its lips, and will drive it back by the way it 
came. Let them take that for an answer. 

And now nothing was to be done but to await the issue, 
as it seemed, of the great battle on the frontier. Some 
hours of dread suspense go by; and then all Jerusalem 
leaps into exultant, maddening joy, when the news arrives 
of the prodigious catastrophe which destroyed Sennacherib’s 
host. Our Bible story leaves the whole incident in in- 
scrutable mystery. “The angel of the Lord went out 
and smote the camp of the Assyrians.” “That is all we are 
told. But the probable key to the mystery is provided 
elsewhere. Herodotus tells a story, gleaned from Egyptian 
sources, of how the King of Egypt, when thus threatened 
by Sennacherib, and being deserted by his army, entered 
like Hezekiah into his temple and prayed. ‘Then, cheered 
and strengthened by his prayer, he gathered together an 
army of artisans and marched out to meet the Assyrians 
at Pelusium. There, during the night, a multitude of mice 
devoured the bow-strings of the enemy, who on the morrow 
precipitately fled. Such is the Egyptian version of the 
incident. And we learn from it that the catastrophe fell 
upon Sennacherib, near Pelusium, whereas our Bible 
account leaves the locality unhinted at. And we learn, too, 
in all probability—as, indeed, the Bible account would 
have suggested—that the destroying angel was the plague. 


302 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


For the mouse was a symbol of plague, as we see from the 
story in 1, Samuel vi., being recognized even in those early 
times as a chief plague-carrier ; and the picturesque story 
of the mice eating up the Assyrian bow-strings is probably 
only a fanciful way of expressing the fact that the Assyrian 
army was paralysed by plague, which suddenly overtook it 


in that pestilent neighbourhood of Pelusium—notorious — 


throughout the ancient world for its virulent unhealthiness. 
It lay upon the edge of those treacherous marshes that went 
by the name of the Serbonian Bog. Sir George Adam 
Smith reminds us that a Persian army was decimated there 
in the fourth century before Christ ; that the disease which 
depopulated the earth in the days of Justinian first appeared 
in the neighbourhood of Pelusium ; and that the Crusaders 
suffered infection 1n this district. “The foul vapours of 
these malarious marshes might work terrible destruction 
in an army ; and there can be little doubt that here was 
the spot and here the cause of the overthrow of Senna- 
cherib. With violent swiftness the plague overtook him, 
like an angel in the night ; and, as our Authorized Version 
says with an unintentional touch of Irish humour, “ when 
they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead 
corpses.” 

So heavy was the catastrophe that the proud Sennacherib 
was forced to turn tail without offering battle to the Egyptians. 
The detachment left at Jerusalem slunk off amazed, and the 
whole host melted away across the northern hills and back 
into Nineveh, It was Assyria’s last aggressive campaign, 
and she never recovered from it. A few years later that 
tyrant empire had finally passed away. 


The might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, 
Had melted like snow in the glance of the Lord. 


Perhaps the only adequate historical parallel is Napoleon’s 
retreat from Moscow, when in one night of bitter frost 
20,000 horses are said to have perished, and the Grand 


vs ? 


CO tae OPE Og, 


THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB 302 


Army of 250,000 men, without any decisive defeat on the 
field, dribbled back, a broken and ragged mob, to the frontier, 
and only 12,000 of them ever reached home again. 

So was Isaiah’s confidence startlingly justified. Worldly 
might had overreached itself, and an arrogant imperialism 
was laid in the dust. It was by far the most dramatic 
vindication of their faith that had ever been vouchsafed 
to Israel. And Isaiah’s noble voice rises into a lyrical 
rapture of praise: “ Now will I arise, saith the Lord ; 
now will I be exalted ; now will I lift up myself. Hear, 
ye that are afar off, what I have done; and, ye that are 
near, acknowledge my might. ‘The sinners in Zion are 
afraid”’ (sin and oppression among his own countrymen 
are as vile to him as among the foreign tyrants, true patriot 
as he is); “fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. 
Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who 
among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that 
walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that 
despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hand 
from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing 
of blood and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil ; he shall 
dwell on high : his place of defence shall be the munitions of 
rocks : bread shall be given him ; his waters shall be sure. 

. . Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble 
knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, 
fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, 
even God with a recompense; He will come and save 
you... . And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, 
and come to Zion with songs and everlasting Joy upon their 
heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and 
sighing shall flee away.” 

With these words, written under the impulse of so great 
a deliverance, the prophecy of Isaiah closes. For forty 
years, since that far-off day in youth when he trembled 
before his vision of God in the Temple, and the angel 
had touched his lips with the living coal, this man had 


304 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


been the bulwark of his nation, challenging his fellows 
again and again with God’s oracles, pleading with them 
to be loyal to the Right, in the assurance that right was might 
in a universe of moral order. Now the work of his lifetime 
was crowned with blessing. The agelong terror of Assyria 
was banished like a nightmare at waking. And it seemed 
to the eyes of hope that the Kingdom of Heaven was at 
hand, where a king should reign in righteousness, and princes 
should rule in justice; where base servility should be 
done away, and the vile person no more be cringed to as 
noble, but where the truly great man should stand out 
in ungrudged leadership like the shadow of a great rock 
in a weary land. Alas! that day is still to dawn. But its 
ultimate advent is guaranteed by such great incidents in the 
past as this story records for us. Humanity learns to find 
its true path very slowly ; but there are turning-points 
in history which, having once rounded, we cannot altogether 
forget. When Isaiah staked all against Sennacherib and 
won, he secured a permanent victory for the soul of mankind : 
the faith that he then established is, despite all base tergiversa- 
tion, a perpetual inheritance for our race. He showed 
up the hollowness of the big battalions. He broke their 
spell, And, on the foundations of his faith in a God of 
Right, tyranny after tyranny has been crumpled up on 
earth ; the empires of personal aggrandisement, of loot 
and lust and cruelty, have been steadily counteracted and 
destroyed. And the world moves on toward liberty, equality, 
fraternity ; toward universal commonwealth. ‘The war- 
gods and the lust-gods are losing hold. ‘The God of 
Righteousness wins His way, whose service is perfect freedom, 
whose will is our peace. 


XXITI 


‘THE FOURTH MAN 
IN THE FURNACE 


20 








king, True, O King. He answered and said, Lo, I see four men. 
walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt ; and the 
of the fourth is like a son of the gods. ; 

DANIEL iii. ue 


XXIII 


THE FOURTH MAN IN THE FURNACE 


T is strange that the man Daniel, who figures so pro- 
minently in the romantic literature of later Judaism, 

is nowhere spoken of in the chronicles of Jewish history. 
There is, indeed, a Daniel mentioned in Ezra viii., in the 
list of those who returned from captivity ; and again in 
Nehemiah x., among those who sealed the covenant of the 
new law. But nothing more is said concerning him. ‘The 
prophet Ezekiel, however, refers to some one named Daniel 
as an outstanding type of godly wisdom, naming him along 
with Noah and Job: he represents God declaring that not 
even three such men as Noah, Daniel and Job should be 
able to deliver a sinful land from its just punishment, And 
elsewhere Ezekiel mockingly taunts the King of Tyre as 
one who supposed himself to be wiser than Daniel. In 
Ezekiel’s day, therefore, Daniel was a recognized figure 
in the roll of Jewish heroes—one whose name was proverbial 
for wisdom. But the Daniel who is the hero of this book 
that bears his name is represented as a contemporary of 
Ezekiel in the days of the Captivity. It is difficult to 
think of Ezekiel referring to any contemporary, however 
distinguished, in the same breath with legendary saints 
like Noah and Job. And if he indeed did so, it is the 
more difficult to reconcile the silence, concerning this 
Daniel, of the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah with the 
presence in the actual life of their day of so distinguished 


and already almost legendary a figure. 
307 


308 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


But romance would hardly have gathered around the name 
of Daniel without some basis in fact. ‘There evidently 
was such a man, renowned for extraordinary wisdom, whose 
character had already become proverbial by the time that — 
Ezekiel wrote his prophecies. More than that we cannot 
say ; for the Book of Daniel itself, though vaguely founded 
upon historic tradition, must not be looked to for accurate 
chronicle. It is an historic romance, like Scott’s Ivanhoe ; 
written, as all critics now agree, in the second century before 
Christ, during the perilous days of the Maccabean revolt 
—that is to say, some four hundred years subsequent to 
the period of Nebuchadnezzar. 

And a very moving romance it is, with an admirable 
sense for dramatic incident, for the picturesque handling 
of detail, and the tense thrill of tragic adventure. It is 
as blood-curdling as a ‘‘ penny dreadful,” yet with an austere 
moral passion underlying it which gives it an almost hieratic 
dignity and stateliness of tone. It is a tract against idolatry 
and worldliness, a vehement pronouncement of God’s 
judgments, and a call to patriotic and holy ardour, all shaped 
into breathless drama by a deft story-teller’s art. A very 
notable book indeed. 

And it was a most telling tract for its times. It was 
written in the days when Israel was tortured by the vile 
oppression of Antiochus Epiphanes, who tried his utmost 
to stamp out Judaism and enforce the worship of the Greek 
gods—even planting a pagan altar in the Holy Place, making 
there ‘‘an abomination of desolation.” ‘Those were days 
which called for an almost fanatical zeal on the part of 
every Jew, if the distinction of his religion was to be pre- 
served, Yet there was a strong Hellenizing party in 
Jerusalem, ready to make terms with Antiochus and to 
ape his idolatrous manners. It was in view of the peril 
of this internal treachery of indolent and worldly men that 
the author of Daniel put forth his vehement plea for tena- 
cious loyalty to the faith of the fathers ; trying to arouse 


FOURTH MAN IN THE FURNACE 309 


all honest consciences by thrilling tales of the martyrs in. 
the old bitter days of captivity, and how they were preserved 
by God from fiery furnace and lion’s den. And it was 
the temper of this book which animated the Maccabees 
- when they rose in their valiant revolt against the tyrant, 
and by superb deeds of daring shook off the alien yoke, and 
gave back to Israel its freedom and its holiness. 

One can picture the stories of this book being told to 
eager boys in many a Jewish cottage-home, rousing them 
to valorous resolve for the love of God and country ; as 
in Millais’ picture we see the English lads drinking in the 
wonderment of tales of the Spanish Main, and all aglow with 
desire to go forth and emulate the great deeds of their sailor- 
fathers. “There was in this book the same sort of crusading 
temper aroused against an idolatrous and tyrannical foreign 
religion as we see depicted in Kingsley’s Westward Ho ! 
Its author wrote, as Kingsley wrote, in a fighting temper. 
And such work will necessarily be partisan. But as there 
was enough of real cruelty and stubborn obscurantism 
in the Roman Church of the sixteenth century to warrant 
Kingsley having a sharp tilt at it in his historical novel, so 
much more, in all probability, was there good cause for 
this old writer to paint in very horrid and contemptible 
colours the tyrannous rule and silly idolatry of Nebuchad- 
nezzar. Anyhow, against Antiochus no partisan opponent 
could speak too fiercely. Antiochus merited the ugliest 
and most damning portraiture. And it is Antiochus, with 
his attempt to make all Jews sacrifice at his abominable 
altar, against whom our author is really writing under guise 
of the name and times of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. 
Antiochus did fling the Jews into a fiery furnace of persecu- 
tion, torturing them in many ghastly ways. And their 
faith gave them a divine companionship in their fiery trial, 
and brought them through to ultimate victory. “The 
people that do know their God shall be strong, and do 
exploits.” 


310. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


The story of the fiery furnace in Daniel is, then, but an 
allegory of the terrible persecution under Antiochus. And 
Daniel himself and his three companions are types, like 
the Mother and Seven Sons of the Second Book of Macca- 
bees, of the martyr-heroes who defied the pagan despot and 
suffered at his hands. 

The story is finely conceived. Our interest is first 
aroused in the personality of these four youths, “ children 
in whom was no blemish, but well favoured and skilful 
in all wisdom, understanding science, and such as had ability 
in them to stand in the king’s palace ’’—a handsome, well- 
bred group of boys who are set apart to be slaves in the 
king’s own household. But to their physical and intel- 
lectual attainments they add the brave integrity of a pure 
religion, and they refuse to contaminate themselves with 


the luxurious wines and meats of the royal palace. They — 


live abstemiously with a noble ascetic resolution : not with 
the squalid and whining asceticism of those who believe 
that there is a virtue in making oneself miserable ; but 


with the cheerful self-denial of those who will run no 


unnecessary risks of temptation, and who win a radiant 
health by their continence, a clear eye and a quick wit. 
And they are in due course rewarded by being set in 
positions of dignity over the affairs of the province of 
Babylon. 

‘Then we are taken to “ the great plain of Dura,” where 
the despot has set up his huge image of gold, and a great 
concourse of all the notables is gathered together for the 


ceremony of dedication. We hear the cry of the herald - 


bidding all men fall down and worship this colossal lump 
of statuary, on pain of death if they refuse. And the whole 
slavish population flops down before the royal idol. But 
not these young Jews. ‘They keep aloof. And at once 


the flatterers of the king buzz round him with the news — 


that these slaves have dared to defy the royal command ; 


whereupon the old despot works himself into a fury. Daniel — 





FOURTH MAN IN THE FURNACE 311 


himself has somehow disappeared from the scene, but the 
three others are hauled up to answer for their effrontery. 
With bold bluntness they tell Nebuchadnezzar to his face 
that they will have nothing whatever to do with his egregious 
_ godlet : ‘Our God, whom we serve, will deliver us out 
of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto 
thee, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden 
image which thou hast set up.” In the manner of tyrants, 
Nebuchadnezzar is forthwith beside himself with rage. 
‘The furnace is heated “‘ one seven times more than it was 
wont to be heated.” ‘The strongest bullies in the army 
are summoned, and the unfortunate trio are bound hand 
and foot and thrown into the fire. And that, one would 
suppose, would stop their talk for ever. But alas for 
Nebuchadnezzar! He is dealing with forces he cannot 
in the least understand. He is confronted with that 
insuppressible faith which again and again in our human 
story has baffled the worst designs of malice. Like 
many a martyr who has gone singing to the stake, 
these young men were actually breaking into triumphant 
song ! 

Among the literary fragments associated with the Book 
of Daniel in its Septuagint version and now gathered into 
the Old ‘Testament Apocrypha, is the famous Song. of the 
Three Holy Children, which some later editor inserted 
into the narrative of the book at this point. ‘“‘ The king’s 
servants,” we are told, ‘‘ ceased not to make the oven hot 
with rosin, pitch, tow, and small wood ; so that the flame 
streamed forth above the furnace forty and nine cubits, 
And it passed through, and burned those Chaldeans it found 
about the furnace. But the angel of the Lord came down 
into the oven together with Azarias and his fellows, and 
smote the fire out of the oven ; and made the midst of the 
furnace as it had been a moist, whistling wind, so that the 
fire touched them not at all, neither hurt nor troubled them. 
Then the three, as out of one mouth, praised, glorified 


are THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


and blessed God in the furnace, saying (in the words of the 


Canticle ever since used in the Church under the title 


Benedicite) : O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord : 


praise and exalt him above all for ever. O all ye winds, 
bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever. 
O ye fire and heat, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt 
him above all for ever. O all ye dews and storms of snow, 
bless ye the Lord : praise and exalt him above all for ever. 
O ye lightnings and clouds, bless ye the Lord : praise and 
exalt him above all for ever. . . . O ye spirits and souls 
of the righteous, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him 
above all for ever. O ye holy and humble men of heart, 
bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for 
ever." 

A glorious canticle of praise it is. And it was a noble 
faith that could imagine it being sung even by men at the 
stake. But they were not alone. ‘The martyrs never 
are. ‘There was a fourth man in the furnace—one whose 
form was like a son of the gods ; a supernatural presence. 


And Nebuchadnezzar, smitten with sudden terror, shouts _ 
to the three men to come forth. ‘Then Shadrach, 


Meshach, and Abed-nego came forth of the midst of the 
fire. And the princes and governors and captains, being 
gathered together, saw these men, upon whose bodies the 


fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, — 


nor the smell of fire had passed on them.”’ And the story 


ends with the king’s acknowledgment of the God of Israel, 


and the grant of a free permit to the Jews to worship as 
they thought fit without molestation. 

It is all a parable of the effect of martyrdom throughout 
the history of man. ‘‘ The blood of the martyrs is the seed 
of the Church.” ‘There is a spirit in man, inspired by 
faith, which refuses to be crushed by any tyranny ; against 
which all tyranny, with its utmost horrid apparatus of bodily 
torture, is absolutely powerless. You may burn and mutilate 


and crucify men’s bodies, but their souls remain uncon- — 


\ 


rs pe 





FOURTH MAN IN THE FURNACE — 313 


querable. We read the tale of Antiochus and the Jews, 
of Nero and the early Christians, of the Romish Inquisition 
and the Protestants ; and every time it is the martyrs who 
win and the tyrants who lose. ‘The soul of man cannot 
‘be dragooned. ‘The martyr’s head is bloody but unbowed. 
For the strongest power on earth is a man’s conscience, his 
sense of an imperative call to do right. That is a power 
which will rise dominant over all physical distress. It is 
the power of God in us. And therefore those who serve 
conscience at terrible odds have that marvellous and blessed 
sense of a Divine Companion with them, so dramatically 
figured in this old Hebrew tale. ‘They are comforted 
with an amazing strength thereby, until their dauntless 
courage becomes a perpetual astonishment. Weare amazed, 
as we read the heroic martyr-stories, to think how human 
beings could bear what these have borne ; and borne almost 
light-heartedly, sometimes with a veritable glee. We see 
in them not the mere dogged refusal to wince, which some 
men of iron nerve have shown under torture—the sort 
of temper fostered in old Sparta when boys were flogged 
at the public altars in competitive effort after fortitude ; 
or proudly developed amongst the Red Indian braves. “The 
martyr shows another spirit than this. It is not the forti- 
tude of self-reliant pride, but the carelessness of an over- 
whelming certitude of faith. God’s presence is so intensely 
felt that man’s devilry loses its terrors. “‘ Fear not them 
that kill the body, and after that have no more that they 
can do.” Faith can lift a man beyond that fear. ‘The in- 
visible world of spiritual reality so engrosses him that what 
happens to his body is almost negligible. Nothing can 
separate him from the love of God. “To miss God—that is 
the only real dread ; and if he can retain his fellowship 
with God only by passing through a spasm of agony, so 
be it. His affliction is but for a moment, and worketh 
for him a far more exceeding and eternal weight of 


glory. 


314 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


So Browning pictures the inscription on the martyr’s 


tomb : 
I was born sickly, poor and mean, 
A slave: no misery could screen 
The holders of the pearl of price 
From Cesar’s envy ; therefore twice 
I fought with beasts, and three times saw 
My children suffer by his law ; 
At last my own release was earned : 
I was some time in being burned, 
But at the close a Hand came through 
The fire above my head, and drew 
My soul to Christ, whom now I see. 
Sergius, a brother, writes for me 
This testimony on the wall— 
For me, I have forgot it all. 


O brave spirits! What a superb dignity the martyrs 
have given to our manhood! What good thing can we 
not believe of our race when we see men and women reaching 
these heights of spiritual triumph !|_ And what an assurance 
comes to us, through them, of a world of reality beyond the 
body ; of God and the life everlasting. 

This is the miracle of the spirit of man, that he is able 
to look into the face of the most horrible and dismaying 
torments and still retain a gleeful assurance of blessing 
and delight, a communion with God that neither life nor 
death can destroy. ‘The human spirit, inspired by faith, 


does actually contemn and annul the vilest ill-usage, and 


maintain throughout it all a lyrical and laughing confidence 
in the goodness of God. 

In the famous legend of St. Dorothy, her torturers are 
staggered that they cannot break her will ; she is calmly 
communing with Christ, and apparently unconscious of 
pain. ‘‘ Where is your Christ ?”’ they say. And Dorothy 
answers: “* Christ is in paradise where the woods are ever 
adorned with fruit, and roses ever flower; where the 
mountains wave with fresh grass and springs bubble up 
eternally.” “Theophilus, a cynical lawyer standing by, 
says mockingly : “Thou spouse of Christ, send me from 


ae a ee ee ee ae ee eee 


FOURTH MAN IN THE FURNACE 315 


paradise some of these apples and roses.”” Dorothy promises 
quietly that she will. A little while later, we are told, as 
she knelt waiting for the executioner’s sword to end her 
torments, she begged a moment’s respite, and, as she prayed, 
suddenly a beauteous youth stood by her in dazzling raiment, 
who held in his hands three apples and three red roses. ‘Then 
Dorothy said : “ I pray thee, take these to Theophilus, and 
tell him they are what I promised.” ‘Then the sword 
fell. Meanwhile Theophilus had gone home, and was 
telling his companions of his jest with the martyr. All at 
once the angel stood before him, with a grave face, and 
held out to him the wondrous apples and roses, and said : 
*“ Dorothy sends these to thee, as she promised.” “Then 
‘Theophilus believed, and confessed Christ ; and himself 
died soon after in martyrdom, receiving the baptism of 
blood. 

It is a gracious story, redolent of that marvellous faith 
that can blot out the horror and ugliness of physical torture 
with visions of the apples and roses of Paradise. And that 
martyr’s vision, which sees through death’s gate into a 
garden of God, can indeed impress itself on others till they 
are fired with a like unearthly ardour. Faith does thus 
bring into actual substantiality the things hoped for, and 
make evident the things unseen. It has the power of 
alchemy. Evil is transmuted by it into good, bane into 
blessing. “The fiery furnace becomes a garden where man 
feels himself walking with God unhurt and unafraid. 

Can this be, unless there is reality in the Divine Com- 
panionship the martyrs talk of ? 

When the slave-girl, Felicitas, was imprisoned at Car- 
thage with Perpetua and others awaiting martyrdom, she 
gave birth to a child in the dungeon. In her travail she 
cried out ; and her jailors asked her how she expected to 
sustain the pains of death if she thus cried out with pain of 
travail, ‘It is I myself,’ she said, “that am enduring 
these pangs now ; but then there will be Another with 


316 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


me who will suffer for me, because I shall suffer for Him.” 
And in the amphitheatre where the two women were tossed by 
a wild cow, there was no sound from their lips except the 
hymns of praise they sang together. ‘They were sustained 
by God. ‘They endured the cross, despising the shame, 
for the sake of the joy that was set before them. ‘These, 
and thousands like them, have known that the joy of keep- 
ing communion with God in a good conscience is greater, 
incalculably greater, than any ease of body which might 
come through mean and cowardly compromise. ‘They 
have demonstrated to the rest\of us the utter invulnerability 
of the spirit, its immeasurable power of rising above all 
physical fear, and maintaining its hold on heaven in face 


of hell. 
If I still hold closely to Him 
What hath He at last? 
Sorrow vanquished, labour ended, 
Jordan passed. 


Finding, foilowing, keeping, struggling, 

Is He sure to bless? 

Angels, martyrs, prophets, virgins, 
Answer, Yes. 


The solemn glory of the old Latin hymn sounds across 
the centuries to us—an echo of “old, unhappy, far-off 
things, and battles long ago”’ ;_ but triumphant with a faith 
that shines through tears, with a sense of rest after agony, 
with the grasp of an immortal hope. In the furnace of 
sore affliction and cruel persecution the soul has been con- 
scious of the Divine Stranger bringing quietness. And 
when He giveth quietness, who, then, can make trouble? 

“What are these that are arrayed in white robes? and 
whence came they? ‘These are they which came out of 
great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made 
them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are 
they before the throne of God, and serve Him day and 
night in His temple. ‘They shall hunger no more, neither 
thirst any more ;_ neither shall the sun light on them, nor 


Seas Se a 


FOURTH MAN IN THE FURNACE — 317 


any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the 
throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living 
fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears 
from their eyes.” 

Dear God, what faith! Lord, I believe; help Thou 


mine unbelief. 





XXIV 


THE HAND WRITING 
ON THE WALL 






In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote : 
against the candlestick on the plaister of the wall of the king’s pala 
and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the k 
countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so tha 
joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against ano 

DANIEL Vv. 5), 


XXIV 
THE HAND WRITING ON THE WALL 


NDERLYING the romantic fictions of this Book of 
Daniel there is a genuine historical element, but 
it is confused and inaccurate. “The cuneiform inscriptions 
of Babylon have, for example, furnished evidence of the 
existence of a prince called Belshazzar. But he was not 
King of Babylon, as this book says: he was only heir- 
apparent. He may, however, have been in charge of the 
city at the time of its fall ; and it seems that he was killed 
during the Persian attack. Again, he was not the son of 
Nebuchadnezzar : he was the son of Nabuna’id, the reigning 
king, who was not related to Nebuchadnezzar. But it is 
possible (though there is no evidence of this) that Nabuna’id 
may have married a daughter of Nebuchadnezzar, in which 
ease the grandson Belshazzar might, in the usage of that 
day, be spoken of as Nebuchadnezzar’s “ son.” 

Again, it was Cyrus the Persian who overthrew Babylon, 
and not Darius the Mede. ‘The Darius whom this book 
speaks of is quite unidentifiable in any other historic source ; 
unless, as is sometimes held, he is the Gobryas who, as 
Cyrus’s general, commanded the attack upon the city. But 
this man was never ruler of the empire, as he is represented 
to have been in this book, even if we suppose that Cyrus 
exalted him to some sort of vice-royalty. 

‘The account of the assault on Babylon, too, differs a good 
deal from the cuneiform narrative ; but here the Book of 
Daniel is pretty closely supported by the old traditions 

21 321 


322 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


related in Xenophon’s Cyropzdia, in Herodotus and in 
Josephus, which all agree in representing Babylon’s over- 
throw as taking place by a sudden assault in the midst of the 
celebration of a feast. Our author is, therefore, following 
a very popular tradition which in all likelihood may have 
good historical foundation. 

It can be gathered from the cuneiform records that the 
prince, Belshazzar, was a man of military age, taking part 
in his country’s wars. Both he and his father were in 
Babylon at the time of its capture: the latter was taken 
prisoner, while the former is said to have been killed in a 
night assault two or three weeks afterwards, having appar- 
ently kept up a resistance to the enemy in some fort, after 
the main city had fallen. ‘This gives a touch of heroism to 
Belshazzar which is altogether wanting in his portraiture in 
the Book of Daniel. 

The details of our story, then, are not quite trustworthy, 
but the main features are fairly accurate—accurate enough, 
anyhow, for an historical novel, the merits of which are 
not those of a precise chronicle but of an imaginative pre- 
sentation of a great passage in human history, with an 
emphatic purpose of moral appeal. 

And the story dealt with here is one of the very great 
passages of human history. It is the hinge upon which 
the doors swung open from the ancient world of Semitic 
imperialism into the great middle period of Aryan imperialism 
—the empires of Persia, Greece and Rome, upon which 
the foundations of our modern world were laid. For the 
Persians alone among the great nations of Central Asia 
are of the same stock as Greek and Roman and Teuton ; 
and with the entry of the Persian into the sphere of world- 
politics a new age began ; a new age nobly symbolized in 
the great figure of Cyrus who initiated it. 

For this Persian imperialism shows a new and enlightened 
temper ; and from its day forward—very slowly, indeed, 
and with many reversions—we see the old imperialism of 


HAND WRITING ON THE WALL 323 


loot and enslavement gradually transformed into an im- 
perialism of responsibility, protection and development, 
which culminated at last in Roman justice and world- 
wide peace. And Cyrus stands alone among the 
ancient empire-builders as a man honoured for his 
piety and his humanity. “In both Greek and 
Hebrew literature he stands as the type of a just and 
gentle prince,” says Dean Stanley. Indeed, the Old Testa- 
ment references to him are astoundingly eulogistic. To the 
“Second Isaiah’ Cyrus is the Lord’s Anointed, a true 
Messiah : “Thus saith the Lord of Cyrus, he is my shep- 
herd, and shall perform all my pleasure. . . . Thus saith 
the Lord to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I 
have holden, to subdue nations before him; I will go 
before thee, and make the crooked places straight, that thou 
mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy 
name, am God of Israel. For Jacob my servant’s sake, 
and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name ; 
I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me.” 
Thus, for the first and last time, was a foreigner acclaimed 
by a Hebrew prophet as the anointed of the Lord, one who, 
albeit unknowingly, was in practice worshipping Israel’s 
God of Righteousness. And just as the Christian Fathers 
would sometimes speak of noble pagans like Socrates as 
Christians before Christ, having anima naturaliter Chris- 
tiana, so the old prophet spoke of Cyrus as belonging to the 
true Israel, as being, though unwittingly, the Lord’s 
Messiah. 

Hence when the cry echoed round the word, “ Babylon 
is fallen,” and the humane Cyrus entered upon almost 
world-wide rule, a new era dawned in history ; and that 
God of Righteousness upon whom Israel staked its faith 
began to have a recognition among the nations, however 
dim and wavering, which marked a definite upward step 
in the civilization of mankind. And this new era was 
ushered in by a signal act of magnanimity: Cyrus set 


324. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


Israel free. Judaism had once more a home and a temple 
from which to evangelize the world. 

The fall of Babylon was, therefore, an episode of enormous © 
historical importance. And the author of this Book of — 
Daniel employs all the force of a fine dramatic imagination 
to impress upon us the thrilling shock of the event, and all 
the force of his piety to make us discern in it the unescapable 
hand of Divine Providence. 

We all know how the English staff officers were dancing 
in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo, and we look back on 
the tale with pleasure as an illustration of the high-spirited 
sportsmanship with which our people face great issues. 
For these men were ready, when the signal came, to move 
off on the instant to their grim duty. And if we glory in 
the touch of bravado in Drake’s game of bowls on Plymouth 
Hoe, we do so because we know very well that Drake had 
made his preparations, and was giving no advantage to the 
enemy by his cool imperturbability. But of a very different 
character is this scene in old Babylon. Belshazzar is repre- 
sented as carousing, with the recklessness of a born fool, 
at a grand feast with his courtiers and courtesans, at the 
very moment when the Persian army is preparing to break 
into the city. Not content with supping off the usual 
plate of the royal household, this fellow, with his head full 
of wine, orders in the sacred golden vessels that had been 
captured by Nebuchadnezzar from the Jerusalem Temple. 
It was an insolent act of frivolous sacrilege and flaunting 
vanity. ‘These glorious vessels of solid gold, the pride of 
the Jews and the envy of the Gentiles, had never, we are 
to suppose, been put to any secular use hitherto. ‘They had 
been regarded even by their captors with a sort of super- 
stitious reverence, and were kept in the neighbouring temple 
of Bel. But Belshazzar, with the wine in his head, is 
determined to stick at nothing which can add to the luxurious 
indulgence of the hour. He is no warrior recreating him- 
self for a moment, having done his last stroke of prepara- 


HAND WRITING ON THE WALL 325 


tion for the fight. He is an idiotic fdweur, incapable of 
realizing danger until it strikes him, incapable of fore- 
thought, energy or purposefulness, So he sits in fancied 
security behind his monstrous city walls, knowing nothing 
of the great engineering feat by which even now the Persians 
were on the point of breaking his defences ; and publicly 
flaunting a wild act of sacrilegious insult which would arouse 
a fury of just resentment in the breast of every Jew in his 
dominion—a deliberate provocation to revolt at a moment 
when he needed the loyal help of his every subject. But 
he recked nothing of all this. He was out to enjoy himself 
and damn the consequences, What on earth did it matter 
to-him what a parcel of slaves might think about his action ? 
He would have his fling; and if any of his nobles felt a 
bit squeamish, the worse poltroons they ! 

So on went the feast, with the wine passed round in 
goblets of gold. ‘Toasts were drunk to the national idels, 
and the frivolous crowd waxed heady with merriment. 
And then, “in the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s 
hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the 
plaister of the wall. ‘Then the king’s countenance changed, 
and his knees smote one against another.” 

 Mené, tekél, perés,’ were the words upon the wall— 
mysterious words which the astrologers could not decipher, 
and which the scholars have puzzled over ever since. “The 
interpretation of them given in the Book of Daniel itself 
seems to be about as plausible a one as can be arrived at. 
Mené has, it is suggested, the meaning “ numbered” ; 
tekél, the meaning “weighed”; and perés or upharsin 
(singular and plural forms of the same word), the meaning 
“division”? or “things divided.” Hence the paraphrase 
by which Daniel interprets the message : “ God has num- 
bered your days; thou art weighed in the balances, and 
found wanting ; your kingdom shall be divided up among 
the Medes and Persians.” ‘Those who are curious to in- 
quire further, however, may consult Dr. Charles’s notes 


326 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


in his popular commentary in the Century Bible, where 
they will find various alternative explanations. It is pointed 
out in particular that these words are nouns not participles, 
and some scholars maintain that they are but the Aramaic 
names of three weights, the Hebrew mdneh or Latin mina, 
the shekel, and the peras or half-mina. ‘The mysterious 
sentence would then read: “‘ A mina, a mina, a shekel, 
and two half-minas,” and is to be taken as a sort of cryptic 
proverb describing the heavy-weight Nebuchadnezzar, the 
light and worthless Belshazzar, and the kingdoms of the 
Medes and Persians that followed. But it may be that 
both interpretations have truth in them, and that the 
words were intended to bear a double significance. 

In any case, where did they come from? Dhid our 
author invent them along with the rest of his tale? Were 
they an old proverb about the Babylonian empire which 
had been handed down to him, and which he makes dramatic 
use of ? Were they, as some suggest, an inscription found 
upon the ruined palace walls in a later age, and thus giving 
a clue to the story of the miraculous hand? Or shall we 
even allow reality to the story in consideration of similar 
uncanny phenomena vouched for among scientists? Alfred 
Russell Wallace, for example, stoutly declares in his @racles 
and Modern Spiritualism that the phenomenon of a hand, 
unattached to any human body, taking up a pen and writing 
with it, was seen by many persons in the occult séances 
conducted by Sir William Crookes. And in the same book 
he quotes William Howitt, the novelist, as affirming that 
he had both seen and touched such hands, and even received 
flowers from them! It would seem that there certainly 
do take place very many incomprehensible effects of psychic 
power, and the stories concerning them are not to be all 
hastily brushed aside as mere trickery or hallucination. 
It is, at least, just noteworthy that something has caused 
people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries after 
Christ to declare that they have seen such things as, accord- 


HAND WRITING ON THE WALL 327 


ing to this tale, were seen by people in old Babylon five 
centuries before Christ. And so it is possible that the story 
of the magic hand is not pure invention, but based upon 
some tradition of a ghostly apparition. But Belshazzar’s 
feast was not a séance ; and the story of what took place 
at it, written nearly four hundred years later, is certainly 
not evidence worthy of laborious examination. So it 
is not worth while to worry much over the problem as to 
whether our author was inventing a splendid tall story out 
of his own head, or whether he was following some tradi- 
tion of uncanny miracle when he told of the mystic hand 
writing on the wall. It is not the exact origin of the tale 
that matters, but its dramatic propriety in throwing a lurid 
flare upon the momentous historic event of the doom of 
Babylon. And it does this in a manner that touches 
sublimity——with such unforgettable force that the hand 
writing on the wall has become for all the world a proverb 
of impending judgment, a symbol of nemesis. It is assuredly 
a great artist who thus pictures to us at large the roistering 
banquet, and then, in contrast, the sudden, trembling horror 
of the tipsy crowd and the hurried summons of all the 
magicians and soothsayers, followed by the entry of Daniel 
and his defiantly stern eloquence against the prince; and 
then finishes off his story with the single curt sentence : 
“Tn that night was Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans, 
slain.” In such crushing, irreversible manner falls the 
doom of God. And the rest is silence. 

According to Herodotus and Xenophon the Persians, 
by a daring and laborious strategem, had diverted the waters 
of the Euphrates into a canal to such a degree as to make 
it possible for their army to enter the city along the river 
bed. ‘The enormous walls of Babylon were impregnable 
but the course of the great river through the city necessitated 
a huge gap in these walls, and here the Persians detected 
their opportunity. By their great engineering effort the river 
bed was made passable, and while the foolish Chaldeans 


328 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


feasted the Persian army poured into the streets undeterred. — 

And then was fulfilled Jeremiah’s pungent prophecy 
of doom upon that tyrant city: “O thou that dwellest 
upon many waters, “abundant in treasures, thine end is 
come, and the measure of thy covetousness. Behold, I 
am against thee, O destroying mountain, saith the Lord, 
which destroyest all the earth ; and I will stretch out my 
hand upon thee, and the land shall tremble and sorrow : 
for every purpose of the Lord shall be performed against 
Babylon, to make the land of Babylon a desolation without 
an inhabitant. The mighty men of Babylon have forborn 
to fight, they have remained in their holds: their might 
hath failed ; they became as women. One post shall run 
to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to 
show the King of Babylon that his city is taken at one end, 
and that the passages are stopped. And I will make drunk 
her princes, and her wise men, and her captains, and her 
rulers, and her mighty men: and they shall sleep a per- 
petual sleep, and not wake, saith the King, whose name is 
the Lord of Hosts. And Babylon shall become heaps, a 
dwelling-place for dragons, an astonishment, and an 
hissing.” 

At perhaps an earlier date, a prophecy, included in the 
Book of Isaiah, had pictured the ox-wagons groaning under 
the weight of the great Babylonian idols as these were carried 
away by the victors: ‘* Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth ; 
the carriages are heavy laden with idols ; they are a burden 
to the weary beasts.” But this particular prophecy does 
not seem to have been fulfilled. According to Cyrus’s 
own account, preserved on ancient inscribed cylinders, he 
maintained an attitude of respect to the local temples ; 
and the temple of Bel was still standing in the time of 
Alexander. And this would seem quite in accord with 
Cyrus’s generous and politic disposition. 

But the humiliation of the city was complete. The 
‘* Virgin-Daughter of the Chaldeans,” as the Second Isaiah 


HAND WRITING ON THE WALL 329 


says, ““could no more be called tender and delicate ; no more 
be called The Lady of Kingdoms.” She became a slave, 
crouching in menial labour at the grindstone ; widowed 
and childless at one stroke. For she had trusted in her 
wickedness, and said: ‘*‘ None seeth me.” She had sat 
in her pride, saying, ‘‘I shall be a lady for ever; I am, 
and there is none else beside me.” But her astrologers 
and her star-gazers and her prognosticators were all in 
vain; “none shall save thee.” And none did. 

It seems doubtful whether the fortifications of Babylon 
were dismantled ; and the city continued to flourish for 
a couple of centuries after this, although the prestige and 
terror of its name had gone for ever, and it never recovered 
its former splendour. It was at a much later period that 
it finally decayed and became a ruin, “a home for jackals,” 
with the marshes spreading around it as “‘ pools for bitterns.”’ 
‘Then, indeed, the terrible prediction of the Isaianic pro- 
phecy was literally fulfilled: ‘‘ Babylon, the glory of 
kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be 
as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall 
never be inhabited; neither shall the Arabian pitch tent 
there ; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. 
But the wild beasts of the desert shall lie there ; and their 
houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and ostriches 
shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there ; and wolves 
shall cry in their castles, and jackals in their pleasant 
palaces.” 

Such was the ultimate doom of this gigantic city which 
was the terror of the ancient world. Old Testament 
prophecy is full of the echoes of its resounding fall. And 
still in the New ‘Testament that ancient startled cry, at 
once of doom and of hope, “ Babylon is fallen !”’ is raised 
afresh as a threat against the Neros and Domitians of Rome, 
and as a promise of relief to the persecuted Christians. For 
the fall of Babylon reverberated down the centuries as a 
thundering judgment of God ; as the chief overwhelming 


330 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


example of the irresistible ascendancy of the God of justice 
and freedom. 

In our modern world the fall of the Bastille marks an 
epoch, and fixes itself in the mind as a signal emblem of the 
ultimate impotence of mere arrogant might against demo- 
cratic right. But the fall of Babylon marked a greater 
epoch, and may be taken as the symbol of the beginning 
of the whole modern movement of the world. For though 
the Persian empire may have been but little better than 
its predecessors, the age of its advent marks, too, the beginning 
of the great age of Greece ; and under Cyrus that contact 
of Europe with Asia began which transfigured the life of 
the ancient centres of civilization; while the liberality 
and humanity of Cyrus himself set up, however feebly, a 
new standard of imperial government. “The empires of 
Egypt, Assyria and Chaldea belong to a world quite remote 
fromus. Inthe empire of Persia we see the first glimmering 
dawn of the world we know. 

And if we believe that the progress of mankind is no 
haphazard thing, but reveals a controlling Providence, we 
shall delight in the dramatic truth of this old tale which 
records how the finger of God spelt out the doom of Babylon. 
History is the best of moral preceptors, and we see the 
mené, tekel, upharsin written again and again upon the 
palace walls of its Belshazzars. “Chey may seem to flourish 
like the green bay tree, but the law of the universe is against 
them: they cannot survive. Wrong has no impunity — 
in this world ; its judgment is indelibly written, whether 
in the life of the individual or of the nation. As Huxley ~ 
declared in his fine incisive way: “The absolute justice 
of the system of things is as clear to me as any scientific 
fact. ‘The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as 
that of the earth to the sun, and more so—for experimental 
proof of the fact is within reach of us all—nay, is before 
us all in our own lives, if we had but the eyes to see it.” 
We may, if we will, plunge recklessly into our orgies of 


HAND WRITING ON THE WALL 331 


_ self-indulgence and brutal inconsiderateness, but the walls 
of the universe hem us in, and sooner or later the superhuman 
fingers are to be seen writing upon them the tale of our 
destruction. We are, indeed, free to defy the Universal 
Will toward righteousness, but only at the price of un- 
escapable penalty. ‘‘ A man passes,” says Emerson, “ for 
what he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, 
on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Conceal- 
ment avails him nothing; boasting nothing. ‘There is 
confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles, in 
salutations, and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, 
mars all his good impression. His vice glasses his eye, cuts 
lines of mean expression in his cheeks, pinches the nose, 
sets the mark of the beast on the back of the head, and 
writes O fool ! fool ! on the forehead of a king.” 

The Christian religion has often been accused by its 
critics of pretending to find a way round this inevitable 
nemesis which overtakes the sinful life, by its doctrine of 
forgiveness. But that is not true. Our Gospel, indeed, 
proclaims that there is opportunity of recovery and renewal 
for the most erring and pernicious heart of man; and it 
firmly asserts that, when a man throws over his evil ways, 
at the same time he sets going forces which may counteract 
and overcome the forces of penalty which have settled upon 
him. But penalty is never eliminated by any conjuring ; 
it abides as long as there is cause for it to abide. The Gospel 
declares that there is a remedy for sin ; it does not declare 
that there is immunity for sinners. “The universe is utterly 
just. All our moral appeal to each other must surely 
rest on that adamantine basis. What a man sows he shall 
reap—whether of sin or of repentance. We cannot dodge 
the Almighty. God’s edicts are evident ; His dooms are 
sure ; His laws no man can annul, “ Be sure your sins 
will find you out” is written broadcast over human history. 
And equally broadcast is written that other word: “If 
a man turn from his wickedness and doeth that which Is 


332 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


right, he shall save his soul alive.” For the God who judges 
us is the God who is bent on saving us. He is a God who 
has become Man, and knows our human temptations and 
difficulties. It is the God who is Christ who judges the 
quick and the dead. Who else could fairly judge us? 
Whom else dare we choose to judge us? And we believe 
it is His judgment which we see going forward in all indi- 
vidual careers, and in all the rise and fall of nations. And 
His dooms, terrible as they are, are not the savage execu- 
tions of a tyrant, but the firm disciplines of a father. 


Belshazzar’s grave is made, 
His kingdom passed away, 
He, in the balance weighed, 
Is light and worthless clay ; 
The shroud, his robe of state, 
His canopy the stone ; 

The Mede is at his gate ! 

The Persian on his throne! 


There Byron leaves him—a bad man _ overtaken by 
nemesis. But in God’s wide universe even our misguided, 
ill-bred Belshazzars may find somewhere a place for repent- 
ance. And all the hard, cruel life of those ancient empires 
that now lie in the dust, superseded by kindlier eras, may yet 
be blossoming otherwhere in some gentler fashion. Life 
is a solidarity. “Through doom and atonement the whole 
race moves to its goal. And we without them shall not 
be made perfect. 

But sin can never escape the hand writing on the wall ; 
and our God, the Eternal Love, is a consuming fire. 


XXV 


THE SIGN OF THE 
PROPHET JONAH 










Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amitt 
saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it. . 
And the people of Nineveh believed God, and put on sackcloth. . . 
And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way ; and 
God repented of the evil, which he said he would do unto them ; and 
he did it not. 72 
Book OF joual . 


An eyil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there 
shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah. The me 
of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and | 
condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonah ; 
behold, a greater than Jonah is here. | 

ST. MATTHEW Xil. 39, 41. 


XXV 


THE SIGN OF THE PROPHET JONAH 


FEW miles away from Nazareth lies a village which 

in ancient times was called Gath-hepher. It was 

the birthplace of the prophet Jonah, the son of Amittai, 
who, as we are told in 1m. Kings xiv. 25, flourished in the 
reign of Jeroboam IJ. in the first half of the eighth century 
B.c. On a hill beside the village there is still pointed 
out the traditional site of the prophet’s tomb. Jesus 
Christ must have seen this place many a time in his boy- 
hood, and dreamt of the famous old preacher who had 
trodden this ground so many centuries earlier. No other 
of the Old Testament prophets had come from our Lord’s 
own immediate neighbourhood, and he must have felt, 
in consequence, a special interest in Jonah—an interest 
greatly deepened later on when his awakening mind came 
to realize that the Book of Jonah reached the loftiest height 
of Old Testament evangelism, and gave the most noble 
precedent to his own universal Gospel. Of the message 
and deeds of the historic Jonah, however, we really know 
nothing beyond the bare fact that he preached in the pros- 
perous days of Jeroboam IJ., and apparently supported and 
justified that doughty king in his great imperial designs, 
For this Jeroboam took advantage of the temporary weak- 
ness of Syria, and extended his kingdom almost to the same 
area as that of Solomon—from Hamath on the Orontes 
in the far north to the Dead Sea in the south—and for 
forty years gave Israel an unwonted enjoyment of power, 
splendour and wealth. And all this great enterprise was 


335 


336 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


carried through, says the historian, “‘ according to the word 
of the Lord God of Israel, which He spake by the hand of 
His servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet, which 
was of Gath-hepher.”’ 

Jonah seems to have been, then, a patriotic prophet who 
believed in extending Israel’s temporal power, and eagerly 
backed up his sovereign’s ambitious exploits. “These were 
possible, however, only because the Assyrians had crippled 
the power of Damascus ; in other words, Israel was in- 
directly indebted to Nineveh for its newly recovered pros- 
perity. And hence it is argued that the prophet Jonah 
may have had grounds for intercourse with Nineveh, and. 
may have visited that city. Ifso, there would be a founda- 
tion of fact on which to build up the tale told in the Book 
of Jonah. ‘This is, of course, mere guess-work. For the 
book called after Jonah is not a history, and need not depend 
on any faint historical foundation at all. It is a piece of 
improving fiction, a novelette with a purpose, dating from 
about five hundred years after the lifetime of its hero ; 
and almost the latest, as itis perhaps the most nearly Christian, 
book in the Old ‘Testament canon. It speaks of Nineveh, 
which was destroyed in 606 B.c.—a century and a half 
after Jonah—in the past tense as a place that had once 
been flouishing but had already ceased to exist. It quotes 
from the Book of Joel, a fourth-century writing. Its 
style and language belong to the later Hebrew period. And 
on these grounds, among others, the scholars date it roughly 
at about 300 or 250 B.C. 

This delightful little book has had a most unfortunate 
career. ‘The inventive ability of its author has concocted 
so startling an incident that popular attention has been 
diverted from the ethical message of the book to think 
only of Jonah’s uncomfortable lodging in the belly of the 
whale. And nonsensical notions of the inspiration of 
Scripture have led folk to swallow the whole tale as pure 
matter of fact—an exploit in voracity that beats the whale 


SIGN OF THE PROPHET FONAH — 337 


itself. But the author had no intention of stretching our 
mental gullets to this extent. It is pleasant to think of his 
amusement as he watched, from his vantage-ground in 
the beyond, the pious Dr. Pusey fumbling about to find 
stories of men who had been swallowed entire by whales 
or sharks in order to prove the historicity of Jonah’s experi- 
ence ; and denouncing all who do not believe in it as infidels, 
What a charming opportunity for some future Landor 
to pen an imaginary conversation in the next world between 
Pusey and the author of Jonah! Indeed, when one thinks 
of it, there are quite a number of such interviews that beckon 
one enticingly : a revealing little chat between St. Paul 
and Calvin, for example ; or a few words from the author 
of the Apocalypse to the Second Adventists; or a dis- 
cussion on the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture between 
Moses and Mr. Gladstone. 

However, the purpose and character of the Book of 
Jonah are becoming clear to us again nowadays, as no doubt 
they were to its original readers, who enjoyed the story of 
the whale just as we enjoy the story of Cinderella’s fairy 
coach. And because we can take it at its proper value, 
our minds are disengaged to dwell upon the moral message 
of the allegory ; and its incomparable generosity and tender- 
ness captivate our hearts, and make us want to bind this 
quaint, glorious little book in vellum and gold. 

Its author had the heart of a Christian missionary. He 
saw God yearning over the souls of men—not Israelites 
only, but all men, even the enemies of Israel. Had not 
the great Isaiah spoken of Egypt and Assyria and Israel 
all in one breath as children of God? “In that day shall 
Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a 
blessing in the midst of the land : whom the Lord of Hosts 
shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria 
the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.” Had 
not Amos seen the hand of God guiding the Philistines 

and the Syrians even as He guided Israel? “ Are ye not as 
é; 2,2, 


338 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel ¢ 
saith the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the 
land of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the 
Syrians from Kir?” Were were old-time rebukes to 
the exclusive pride of Israel. But our author works upon 
these ancient precedents with a more tender evangelical 
desire and a more earnest ardour. He wants to teach 
Israel its missionary duty to the foreigner, even to those hated 
Assyrian foreigners who had been Israel’s cruellest scourge. 
And so he sets out to tell them a tale, a piece of pure fiction, 
which would carry home its moral to their hearts. And he 
takes for the hero of it the old prophet Jonah. 

Jonah, he says, was once on a time bidden by God to 
go and preach to Nineveh, that monstrous heathen city 
on the Tigris, that with its suburbs stretched three days’ 
journey from east to west. (He exaggerates. Herodotus 
says more reasonably that it was one day’s journey, or 
about twenty miles across; and this would include, pre- 
sumably, much open ground between the village suburbs.) 
But Jonah was so agitated at the idea of having to preach 
to these heathen Ninevites that he rushed to the sea-coast, 
boarded a ship, and made off for the extreme other end of 
the world at Tarshish in Spain. But it is no good for a 
man to try to run away from God. “If I dwell in the 
uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall ‘Thy hand lead 
me.” The Lord sent a terrible storm to overtake the 
ship, and the sailors got into a panic. When they had 
vainly tried every way of saving the ship, they felt that 
there must be a curse upon it, and dectded to draw lots to 
see who the culprit was that was thus being pursued by 
God’s vengeance. Of course the lot fell on Jonah, who 
thereupon made confession, and self-sacrificingly bade them 
throw him into the sea. Well! they were good fellows, 
and loath to take such a step; so they still toiled to keep 
the ship afloat. But it was no good. The tempest beat 
them to a standstill. So at last in desperation, they took 


SIGN OF THE PROPHET FONAH 329 


up Jonah and heaved him overboard ; and at once the 
storm ceased and the sea was still. But God had a big 
fish waiting in the sea, which swallowed Jonah, carried him 
back to the coast of Palestine, and vomited him up on the 
shore all safe and sound. 

‘Then God’s word came to him a second time, and he 
dare not again disobey. So he trudged off across the hills 
and the desert to Nineveh, and stood there in the market- 
place threatening the city with God’s judgment upon its 
sins—one man among a million who alone knew the true 
God ; like the figure described by a modern poet : 

He came to the desert of London town 
Mirk miles broad ; 

He wandered up and he wandered down, 
Ever alone with God. 


But this great hulking city of heathens began to repent. 
By the king’s command everybody put on sackcloth and 
began to fast. Even the horses and cows were dressed in 
sackcloth. No city could be more earnestly penitent. 
And then, as Jonah had all along expected, God forgave 
Nineveh. It was too bad! Jonah felt mightily aggrieved. 
He had wanted to see Nineveh burnt up with brimstone 
like Sodom : such an issue might have repaid him for his 
trouble in travelling all this long journey to denounce 
the wretched city. But now he felt tricked. What right 
had God to treat these scandalous heathen with as much 
mercy as He showed to His own chosen people ? So Jonah 
went and sulked in a corner, like the Prodigal Son’s elder 
brother. It was scorching hot as he sat there outside the 
city walls. But God made a big gourd grow up like magic, 
and the shade of it was very pleasant to Jonah. However, 
he still sulked. And next morning God sent a worm which 
ate at the roots of the gourd, and it withered. ‘Then-a 
fierce sirocco wind came up out of the east, and poor Jonah 
erew faint with the heat and discomfort. ‘Then God 
whispered him in the ear : “‘ Doest thou well to be angry ?” 


340 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


But Jonah was not going to be laughed out of his ill-humour, 
“Yes,” he said, “I have very good reason to be bitterly 
angry.” And the Lord said: “Thou hast pity on the 
gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured ; and should 
not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein 
are more than six score thousand helpless babes, and also 
much cattle?” 

With that noble rhetorical question the tale ends. There 
is no need of any further word. ‘The tender pity of God 
is unanswerable. And His question is left as an abiding 
challenge for Israel through all its future days. “Che Chosen 
People had to learn that the love of God is broader than 
the limits of man’s mind ; that even the fierce and cruel 
Assyrians were also God’s children, capable of repentance 
and destined for salvation ; and are task was not merely 
to save its own soul, but to evangelize the world. 

That is the most generous note ever struck in the Old 
Testament. ‘The Assyrians were the terror and curse 
of the ancient east. For centuries Israel had cowered 
before them. It was they who had ravaged and enslaved 
northern Israel. And yet these people are singled out as 
objects of Israel’s evangelism and God’s mercy. Every 
thought of revenge is to be laid aside; all the piled-up 
wrong of ages to be forgotten and forgiven ; and Nineveh, 
even Nineveh, is to be welcomed into its share of the divine 
pity. The little book which utters this gospel is the very 
crown of Hebrew literature. Any Christian literature might 
be proud of it. 

And its allegory is not so whimsical as at first sight it 


might appear. ‘The great fish that swallowed Jonah is a — 


symbol in frequent use among the prophets. It is used 
by them as a type of the huge powers that swallowed up 
Israel in captivity. In Jeremiah’s fifty-first chapter, for 
example, Israel is made to say: ‘‘ Nebuchadnezzar, the 


king of Babylon, hath devoured me, he hath swallowed me _ 


up like a dragon, he hath cast me out”; while God 


Ee ‘Ghee A ee ew 





DIGNTOP? THE VROPHET: SONA = 343 


declares : “I will punish Bel in Babylon, and I will bring 
forth out of his mouth that which he has swallowed up.” 
To the Semitic imagination the sea was full of fabulous 
monsters—dragons and leviathans. Even to-day the Syrian 
nations, like so many other rather primitive people, will, on 
the occasion of an eclipse, shout and beat drums frantically 
to frighten away the great dragon that is swallowing the 
sun. When Assyria or Babylon swallowed up Israel in 
captivity, what more natural symbol, then, than this of 
the great dragon? And the opening chapters of Jonah 
probably intend by means of this symbol to describe how, 
before the Captivity, Israel had had a message to deliver to 
the nations, but had shirked giving it 5 as a result dire calam- 
ities had come upon her, and she was gobbled up into the 
rapacious maw of the Mesopotamian tyrant. But not for 
final destruction. It was all part of the divine working. 
And at length God caused the tyrant beast to cast forth 
his prey. “Chen again the call comes to Jonah, i.e. Israel, 
to preach God’s truth even to its enemies. And the call 
is obeyed now, but in a bitter spirit of vengeance rather 
than of mercy. Israel is very ready to preach destruction 
upon the foreigners for their sins. “There was never in 
Israel so intense a feeling of separateness and spiritual pride 
as in the days of its re-constitution after the Captivity. “The 
Jew would gladly proclaim God’s doom upon these “ lesser 
breeds without the Law” who had had the effrontery to 
chastise and enslave the Chosen Race. By all means let 
the Lord’s judgment smite them! ‘The Jonah who goes 
to Nineveh hoping to see God punish that detested people 
is doubtless our author’s portrayal of the average Israelite 
of the Persian and Greek period. And it is against this 
temper of exclusiveness, and this spirit of revenge mas- 
querading as righteous indignation, that his noble little 
tract is written. He wants to convert Israel to magnanimity 
and evangelistic love. 

Probably the allegory might be traced further 5 and if 


342 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


we knew more surely the writer’s time and circumstance, 
we might see in the gourd, so quickly growing and so 
quickly vanishing, some power or institution which for 
awhile had given comfort to post-exilic Israel, and whose 
disappearance had provoked tender regret. And just 
because Israel can thus show tenderness in regard to some- 
thing which nearly concerns itself, the writer is the more 
intent to show up the contrast of God’s wider and dis- 
interested pity. It is so easy to love those who are a benefit 
to us. Do not even the publicans the same? But a 
higher ethic bids us love our enemies, do good to them that 
hate us, and pray for them that have persecuted us. ‘That . 
is the ultimate ethic ; and the story of Jonah was written 
to enforce it. No wonder the little book was dear to the 
heart of Christ. 

If we imagine an Armenian writing a cunning little 
parable to teach his countrymen to have pity on Con- 
stantinople, we shall understand the courage of this book, 
and the deft art with which it allays the instinctive hatred and 
terror of the great tyrant city by bringing before its readers’ 
imagination the tens of thousands of helpless, innocent 
children and the poor dumb beasts within it. “There had 
been a day when not even that plea would have succeeded ; 
when Israel, made frantic by torture, had the terrible 
cry wrung out of it: “ Blessed be he that taketh thy little 
ones and dasheth them against the stones,” But the agony 
had passed away now, and our author felt that he could 
safely appeal to the humanity of his readers, if only he could 
light up that fierce old city for a moment as a place where. 
little children played, and kindly family life went on, even as in 
Jerusalem. “ Nineveh has done you bitter wrong,” he 
would say, “but see these children trooping about the 
streets, and the good serviceable cattle bearing their burdens. 
Here is innocence enough. You would not war against 
children, nor teach vengeance to these babes, surely. Be 
magnanimous, at least for the children’s sake.” And one 


SIGN OF THE PROPHET ¥ONAH 343 


can imagine how Israel’s vision of Nineveh as a stronghold 
of haughty and cruel warriors faded, as this tale was told, 
like a dissolving view on the screen, and gave place to another 
vision of a human, even tender, Nineveh, where mothers 
crooned infants to sleep, and children watched for fathers 
coming home. And so the reader’s heart was softened, - 
and the way prepared for the entry of a new evangel of 
God’s universal redemption. 

But the Book of Jonah did not convert everybody to the 
gospel it proclaimed. In our Lord’s day the very scribes 
and Pharisees who professed to be the special guardians and 
exponents of Scripture were often the men who, above all 
others, had failed to grasp its highest messages. ‘That 
is why Jesus so often falls foul of them. And he enjoys the 
humour of rebuking them out of their own ‘sacred books, 
which, with all their pedantic learning and punctiliousness 
they so ill understood. 

Now, twice over in the Gospel of St. Matthew and once 
again in that of St. Luke, we read of Pharisees or other 
unspecified folk coming to Jesus and requesting him to 
give some miraculous sign of his authority. And Jesus 
answers that no sign shall be given to them save the sign 
of the prophet Jonah. A reply thus recorded three times 
by the evangelists certainly has a strong claim to authenticity, 
Doubtless Jesus did make such a reply. What did he mean 
by it? What was the sign of Jonah? 

Nobody would be likely to miss the true meaning of his 
words if it were not for the unhappy insertion of the fortieth 
verse in Matthew’s twelfth chapter, which compares 
Jonah’s sojourn in the belly of the whale to the Son of 
Man’s burial for “ three days and nights in the heart of the 
earth.”’ 

This rather fatuous analogy breaks into the line of 
thought most disconcertingly. The verse is in all prob- 
ability an annotation by some commentator who was a 
good bit of a fool, and it has by inadvertence got written 


344. THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


into the text from the margin where it was first jotted down 
in some old manuscript. It is not likely to be part of what 
Matthew originally wrote ; and it is best to put one’s pen 
through it, and forget it. “Then we see that Matthew’s 
passage corresponds thoroughly with Luke’s, and its meaning 
lies on the surface. Jesus was not drawing fantastic anal- 
ogies between his burial and Jonah’s “three days” in 
the whale. He was at once far too witty and far too earnest 
to indulge in any such vapid grotesquery. His answer 
is full of appositeness, dignity and vigour. “ You want 
some thaumaturgic sign, do you, as a proof of the truth 
J utter? I tell you there shall be no such sign. What 
could it add to or detract from the truth of what I preach ? 
Go back to your own Scriptures ; study the Book of Jonah, 
and you will see that my doctrine is all there in germ: the 
doctrine of universal redemption and world-wide brotherhood, 
‘The grace of God to the Gentiles is the theme of the Book 
of Jonah, and it is my theme also ; and that is why you hate 
to hear me. But just as Jonah’s preaching of judgment 
upon sin was its own sufficient evidence to the Ninevites ; or 
just as Solomon’s wisdom was its own witness to the Queen 
of Sheba, so must my message bear its own authoritative 
stamp ; and it will do so to all simple and earnest souls—to 
you yourselves if you did not deliberately blind your minds 
with prejudice and malice. Let the Ninevites—let any 
simple, truthful people, heathen though they be—be your 
judges. You will stand condemned before them. For they 
repented at the preaching of Jonah ; and there is a greater 
than Jonah among you now.” 

The sign of the prophet Jonah is the self-witnessing 
authority of evangelic truth in the converted lives which 
follow its utterance. It is not an extraneous sign. On the 
contrary, it denies the possibility of such signs. It bids 
us look for the divine authority of a message not In any 
accompanying magic, but in the quality of the message 
itself and the moral effects of it. In this answer Jesus, 


SIGN OF THE PROPHET F¥ONAH 345 


as usual, pierces through all the trickery and humbug and 
muddle-headedness of his opponents, and lays bare the root 
principles that concern the point at issue. "The Pharisees 
were demanding an authority for truth outside the truth 
itself. “There is no such authority. The truth is its 
own authority. You cannot bolster up spiritual truth on a 
padding of miracle; neither can you disprove spiritual 
truth because its preacher shows no thaumaturgic wonders. 
But the mind of man is for ever committing intellectual 
adultery by confusing the authority of truth and right with 
external “signs.” It is continually led away by its admira- 
tion for any sort of showy cunning or meretricious talent 
or occult wizardry, and so failing in loyalty to the spirit 
of truth to which it ought to keep wedded. And it is 
against that fatally immoral tendency that Jesus Christ 
lays down his ringing axiom: there shall no sign be given 
but the sign of Jonah. 

Personalities of great spiritual power and insight have 
often worked wonders on the earth and made the populace 
gape with astonishment. ‘The stories of miracle which 
gather about famous names will seldom be without founda- 
tion. We are only yet on the threshold of understanding 
the sovereignty of mind over matter. “The development 
of legend out of simple occurrences which for some reason 
or other strongly seized men’s imaginations is easily traceable 
again and again, as these studies of Old ‘Testament stories 
show. But that does not explain away very many abnormal 
revelations of power that often accompany a strong life 
of faith. But it is not such happenings in themselves which 
authenticate a man’s message to the world as a message 
from God, but rather the temper that controls them and the 
use to which they are put. Jesus undoubtedly possessed and 
used abnormal powers of healing ; but he flatly refuses to 
rest his claim of divine mission upon any exhibition of 
unserviceable “‘ wonders.” “The only authentic sign-manual 
of God is the sign of Jonah and of every other genuine 


346 THE LEGENDS OF ISRAEL 


prophet—the converting and saving power of the truth 
spoken, its efficacy in the enhancement of life. Three 
hundred years had passed away since that noble little mis- 
sionary parable was written, and yet here were the official 
representatives of Judaism living in blind spiritual pride, 
nursing scorn and hatred of the Samaritan and the Gentile, 
and eager to entrap and suppress the Son of Man who came 
preaching a gospel of universal salvation, and exhibiting a 
love that recognized no boundaries. All the slow develop- 
ment of truth throughout the Old Testament had led 
up to this finally adequate gospel. An intelligent grasp 
of earlier Scripture would have made men leap at the words 
of Jesus as the obvious fulfilment of all that the prophets _ 
had reached out towards. Yet these pitiful pedants, jealous 
of their official authority, do their best to discredit Christ’s 
lovable and conquering truths. But we can do nothing 
against the truth. ‘The scribes may read their Old Testa- 
ment in vain, but its evangel, taken up and reinforced by 
Jesus Christ and His Church, will win the world in spite 
of them. | 

Far away back in the dawn of history Abraham had been 
led into covenant with a God righteous and merciful. And 
his children’s children had for ages stood out as a chosen race 
holding up the light of that truth to the nations. Moses 
and Samuel, Elijah and Isaiah, and all the goodly fellowship 
of the prophets had carried on and replenished that torch 
of truth. Smoky and fading at times through the long 
night of Israel’s troubled history, yet it was never quenched, 
but burnt clearer and brighter as time wore on. And at 
length the day dawned and the Sun of Righteousness arose 
with healing in his wings. “* God, who at sundry times and 
in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by 
the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His 
Son, the brightness of His glory, and the express image of 
His Person, whom He hath appointed heir of all things.” 
It was the Old Testament that fed the heart and mind 


SIGN OF THE PROPHET FONAH — 347 


of Christ, and He is its only adequate interpreter. In Him 
the Chosen People becomes the sacrificial servant of mankind 3 
in Him, as the author of the Book of Jonah yearned to see, 
the very Ninevites of earth are brought into the kindly 
fellowship of redemption; all people become choser 
people ; there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and 
one God and Father of all, who is above all, and in all, and 
through all. Henceforward there is neither Greek nor 
Jew, bond nor free. 

We may still study the Jewish Old ‘Testament with vast 
profit, but only as the foundation of that New Testament 
which is the spiritual Magna Charta of the whole human 
race. And the New ‘Testament stands or falls for ever 
by one only sign of divine authority—the sign of the prophet 
Jonah, in whose story the ultimate evangel of love was 
first uttered, and whose preaching was authenticated by the 
repentance of Israel’s arch-enemy, the dreaded city of 
Nineveh. 

In this way is the little Book of Jonah immortalized by 
Jesus Christ, and linked up with his new world-wide covenant. 
It was meet that it should be so. For Old Testament 
prophecy culminates in this book ; and we take leave of the 
Old Testament on an exalted plane from which it is but a 
brief and easy step into the New; where all that Israel’s 
poets most divinely sang, all that her prophets most bravely 
hoped, at last found an utterance and an embodiment supreme, 
faultless, and final. And the Word, so long struggling 
to find expression through man, became flesh, and once for 
all wrought out with human hands the creed of creeds 
wherein lies salvation for all men for ever. 


Laus Deo, quit est per omnia secula benedictus. 





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The legends of Tsrael : 


Princeton Theological 





